Summary of Susan Burton's Empty

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I was always steeling myself for things like sleepovers and school trips where you went overnight to nature camp, because I dreaded being away from home. But I never wavered, even when I knew my behavior had been registered as rude or strange.
#2 I was ten when I got my first period. I was sitting on a beanbag in the reading corner at school, and I was wearing madras Bermuda shorts. I knew that I would be the first girl in my generation to get her period.
#3 I was a shy person, but I was also one of the shy people who wanted to be seen. I was a blond, bossy older sister who sang solos and won blue ribbons. But as I grew up, I became more and more awkward.
#4 I was no longer the person I’d been my whole life. I was growing up, and I didn’t like my new body. I was not attractive, and I was not blossom-ing; I was coarsening.

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Biography
• Personal Memoirs

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 03 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669398424
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Susan Burton's Empty
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I was always steeling myself for things like sleepovers and school trips where you went overnight to nature camp, because I dreaded being away from home. But I never wavered, even when I knew my behavior had been registered as rude or strange.

#2

I was ten when I got my first period. I was sitting on a beanbag in the reading corner at school, and I was wearing madras Bermuda shorts. I knew that I would be the first girl in my generation to get her period.

#3

I was a shy person, but I was also one of the shy people who wanted to be seen. I was a blond, bossy older sister who sang solos and won blue ribbons. But as I grew up, I became more and more awkward.

#4

I was no longer the person I’d been my whole life. I was growing up, and I didn’t like my new body. I was not attractive, and I was not blossom-ing; I was coarsening.

#5

I was always thin, and I was glad I was thin. But being thin was more like an internal mandate. I looked at other girls’ bodies and tried to emulate their shapes. I didn’t deliberately try to lose weight until several years later, but now I knew that I could lose weight if I wanted to.

#6

I was too scared to look at the back of me, but when I took off my seersucker bathrobe, I saw a circle of blood the size of a pizza. I had never seen anything like it.

#7

I received a check for seventy-five dollars for my story Bellamys. I showed it to my father, who was in his chair at the kitchen table sipping beer. He was happy.

#8

My father had quit his job at WOOD to write the book, and I knew it existed in the world. Writing a book was something you could do that was higher than anything I could do.

#9

I was always most afraid for my father, as he could be out of control, but he was also highly disciplined. I envied the stable homes of my peers, but believed that my parents were vital, beautiful, and intelligent.

#10

I had been saving things for my archives ever since I could remember. I had a conviction that such things mattered, and I understood that they mattered to me as much as they did to my father.

#11

I had a friend at Central Middle named Kelly. One weekend afternoon, on a beanbag in her sister’s bedroom, I read my first issue of Seventeen. I recognized myself as the age the magazine described, and there was pleasure in that demographic affinity.

#12

I loved the ads for menstrual products in Seventeen in my mid-teens. I was taken with the magazine’s focus on insults to the body, but I rejected its suggestions for the management of them. I preferred to imagine myself inside the magazine’s world.

#13

I was 12 years old in the summer after eighth grade, and I was obsessed with Kate, the girl on the swim team. She had a perfect body, and I wanted to look like her. I also wanted to keep my original hair.

#14

My father started coming home late, and I was nervous and glad about it. I was glad because it made me feel less alone in the world. But I was also nervous because it made me wonder if my father was having an affair.

#15

I was used to my father’s contradictions, but this insult threw me. I had always thought that brains mattered more to him than bodies.

#16

My father met Debbie, a woman he had been dating, at a food court, and introduced her to me as a way of explaining himself to her. I felt secure in my father’s love.

#17

I was spending the night at a friend’s house when I heard the garage door open. It was my father, home from work late. I was reading a book in the family room when he came in, and neither of us said anything.

#18

I was not going to forgive or accept that my father had hit me. I pulled my legs up toward my chest, tugged my flannel nightgown over my knees, and my father reached out to me and put a tentative hand on my shin.