When it comes to generating writing material, teenagers are gold. Their world is a narcissistic, anarchic, paranoid hell of anxieties and stresses about how they look; how popular they are or aren’t; and how fast or slowly, big or small their private parts are growing. As an observer, it’s fantastic. Hilarious, at times. Poignant and heartbreaking. It is all the stuff of great human drama because, before your eyes, you get to witness character transformation. Boy grows into man. Girl grows into woman. Writers strain to make this shit up. But — and here’s the catch — we dare not discuss any of this if we want our kids to trust us or ever talk to us again. And that’s because, lifts and pocket money aside, teenagers crave privacy — the need for which hatches both swiftly and silently while we’re sorting out the laundry. It’s as if they suddenly wake up one day creeped out by the thought of all those years we wiped their butts and helped them put on their undies and they go into lock- down. They smoke us out, put up walls, close their doors, shut down their stories, and waft, earphoned, through our homes in a shroud of hormones and appetite. Their lives — in which, until recently, we participated with Too Much Information and gross oversharing — suddenly become ‘none of our business. Joanne Fedler
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary. - Oscar Wilde
  2. We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don't even matter, while all that... - C. Joybell C.
  3. I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with. - Fannie Flagg
  4. That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable. - Deb Caletti
  5. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. - David Foster Wallace
More Quotes By Joanne Fedler
  1. Actively repeating a lie or denial does not make it true.
  2. Extra-marital affairs become things of legend… and often the undoing of legends… and mere mortals.
  3. Cheating is pure hypocrisy. Our partner deserves better than that. If we don’t love someone, we should not be with them. That would also be hypocrisy.
  4. Screaming and repeating lies makes them neither true nor more believable.
  5. There is tremendous trauma in the betrayal caused by a perpetual liar as they repeatedly commit psychological abuse.
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