Home > Author > Mira T. Lee
41 " Coco raised her left eyebrow. Her roommate had taken a couple of pills, and blessed Jesus, she thought she was cured. “Well, good luck, I suppose. "
― Mira T. Lee , Everything Here Is Beautiful
42 " Glancing around the table at the assortment of fair faces, harmless as vegetables, she felt like an alien. She longed for some loud, wacky aunt, some unemployed alcoholic uncle, some hint of tarnish in their normalcy that might legitimize her own strife. "
43 " Lucy Bok wasn’t one of those hopeless cases, trapped behind a wall of psychosis so thick a sledgehammer couldn’t break through. But if she wouldn’t help herself, what more could he do? Even with his decades of experience, this one hurt him somewhere inside. "
44 " Only later, much later, would he understand. Later, in hindsight, they would come together on this: to wonder when it had become impossible to distinguish which parts of Lucia fell under her own jurisdiction and which belonged to her illness. "
45 " ...I think love is just romantic way of explaining selflessness "
46 " Reveal Lucia’s intentions to run off with their child. But truly, she did not know what he would do if he knew. Fly into a rage? Kick Lucia out? Forbid her from ever seeing her daughter again? To tell him the truth would poison whatever relationship he and Lucia had—and then what would happen to Lucia? "
47 " This modest piece of local calm, sitting on a stoop after a family meal, I’m gripped with a strong déjà vu. Those years I traveled abroad, moments like these felt commonplace, but this one feels impossibly rare. There’s a word for this in Portuguese: saudade. It’s not exactly nostalgia, there’s more of a longing in it, for a feeling or way of life that may be impossible to recapture—that may or may not have even existed in the first place. "
48 " But the truth is, I’m still not sure how to tell what’s real—because when you’re inside it, it’s your reality, and if your own perception of the world isn’t valid, then what is? Here’s what I do know: I spent a total of forty days in Crote Six. I missed my baby’s first laugh, first solid foods, first tooth. "
49 " He kept kosher. Our mother would’ve been disappointed; she would not have trusted a grown man who was coarse like a rhino but who ate like a bird. "
50 " One made me gain thirty pounds, swell up like a balloon animal, all twisted and pinched and skin too tight for my body. Pop. The next pill caused headaches, the next diarrhea, the next shot me deep into a neuroleptic daze. They prescribed pills in combination. Added pills for the side effects, then pills for side effects of the pills for side effects. "
51 " In New York he tried to steal from me so many times, he makes trouble in the neighborhood, he gets his ass arrested. I say to his mother, how am I supposed to help a kid like this? I have to send him away, he’s gonna get himself killed here. She says, you are not sending him back, he is teenager and she is not wanting him in the Israeli army, "
52 " The glossy sheen faded. One night I became convinced Yonah was broadcasting my life to Israel via the security monitors in our bedroom. I felt devastated, betrayed, and the world’s troubles draped over me like a heavy tarp. Mr. Takahara was falling into bankruptcy. Juan Carlos needed me to cleanse his body’s qi. Mrs. Sato beckoned to me with each tilt of her chin—I was a geisha girl, to join in her multicultural orgies. "
53 " He invited her to the campo. She politely declined. She could not bear to face the scrutiny of a family of strangers. He did not press. He understood. "
54 " That night I learned Yonah had trained as a marksman, that he’d lost his arm when he tried to remove a Palestinian boy’s body from the path of an IDF tank. "
55 " Narratives of mental illness are often white and middle-class, yet mental illness does not discriminate—it devastates regardless of race, gender, and ethnicity. Was it important for you to challenge that narrative, and to have a wide cast of characters from different backgrounds? "
56 " For years, I tried to defend my sister’s free spirit as a tenacious form of American idealism, which I both respected and admired. But as of late, I could no longer decipher Lucia’s motivations, what was happening inside her head. Perhaps Yonah felt the same. “She want a baby,” he said. “I won’t give her a baby. Who am I to keep her from going, Jie? "
57 " We didn’t think she would bolt, we mostly trusted she would not, except for that small part of us that was afraid we didn’t know this Lucia anymore, the things of which she was capable "
58 " In America, his kind are special. They treat them well.” And no one accused a woman of carrying the spawn of the devil, and doctors would still give him the operations needed to fix his heart. "
59 " I heard a good joke yesterday. What do testes and prostates have in common?” “What?” “Nothing. There’s actually a vas deferens between the two. "
60 " It wasn't that I wanted to keep it from her, but I also wasn't ready to burden her with the hopes of so many. "