The Girls

“I knew how easily it could happen, the past at hand, like the helpless cognitive slip of an optical illusion. The tone of a day linked to some particular item […] Certain patterns of shade. Even the flash of sunlight on the hood of a white car could cause a momentary ripple in me, allowing a slim space of return […] That’s how badly people wanted it—to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them.”

This novel is told through Evie’s perspective as she narrates the summer of 1969 from her adult perspective. This quote emphasizes the nature of memory, particularly the memories that haunt us. In many ways, adult narrator Evie can’t escape her 14-year-old self. This quote uses visual imagery to describe the powerful sensation of memory. It also emphasizes that, despite the brutal memories of our past, these memories remind us that we were once a certain type of person, for better or worse, and that those experiences are important to us.

“Why would she care? She was lost in that deep and certain sense that there was nothing beyond her own experience. As if there were only one way things could go, the years leading you down a corridor to the room where your inevitable self waited—embryonic, ready to be revealed. How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed.”

This quote describes Sasha, Julian’s girlfriend. Sasha is young and therefore ignorant of the ways the world is difficult and disappointing. Evie sees herself in Sasha. Sasha’s “deep and certain sense that there was nothing beyond her own experience” reflects how Evie was before she met Suzanne. For Evie, Sasha’s youth is enviable but also something to fear. This quote suggests that Evie has become pessimistic about life and what’s in store for young people because her own adult life has not panned out the way she had once dreamed.