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Chelsea G. Summers Biography

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“The migraine held me in its gloomy embrace. I rocked in my bed. I willed the railroad spike to remove itself from my head. I counted sheep. I counted breaths. I counted back from 100. I counted on myself. The pain in my head burned lethal umber and gold, shaped like a dagger and sharp as betrayal. I named it Detective Wasserman. I gave it flesh with my worrying, and I flayed it, inch by glorious inch.”

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“She made it, she made it all, and she made it well. She stood with arms akimbo in her Connecticut garden; she strode her kitchen as a colossus. In our small world, she was the great, ever-giving Mother, maker of mysterious soups, magical stews, peerless fluffy loaves of bread, shiny fruit tarts glowing like family jewels, crispy-juicy brown hunks of roasted meat, vegetables cooked so crunchy-tender that your teeth wept, portages of cream, sauces of jus, mysterious dishes of rice and herbs, salads that slayed you, all from produce grown in my mother’s own meticulously kept garden, or from ingredients sourced with an alchemist’s care. My mother was a witch in the kitchen and a Demeter in the garden. We hated her for it.”

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“She made it, she made it all, and she made it well. She stood with arms akimbo in her Connecticut garden; she strode her kitchen as a colossus. In our small world, she was the great, ever-giving Mother, maker of mysterious soups, magical stews, peerless fluffy loaves of bread, shiny fruit tarts glowing like family jewels, crispy-juicy brown hunks of roasted meat, vegetables cooked so crunchy-tender that your teeth wept, pottages of cream, sauces of jus, mysterious dishes of rice and herbs, salads that slayed you, all from produce grown in my mother’s own meticulously kept garden, or from ingredients sourced with an alchemist’s care. My mother was a witch in the kitchen and a Demeter in the garden. We hated her for it.”

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Book:A Certain Hunger
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“You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway. I am a psychopath—and whatever their reasoning and whatever their diagnoses, the eager psychology and criminal justice students are all right to study me. And if they're wrong, I still enjoy their attention, and I'll do what I must to encourage it.”

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“I always marvel at this sort of woman, the sort who accepts total, monogamous devotion like it's her birthright. To my experience, there's nothing that unites these women - they can be smart as pinstripes or dumb as fake fur, they can have classic beauty of a perfectly ripe Honeycrisp apple or the compelling plainness of pie. They tend to be skinny: perhaps their performance of appetite suggests comfort with deprivation. Maybe they dupe men into thinking that they, like air plants, don't need nourishment to survive. I suspect what makes these women irresistible is this: the women who impassion men are those who can maintain that tension between being in love and succumbing to it.”

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“Like prison, I'm never getting out of trouble. The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy - because here's the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy moral business, and feel like you are a better person.”

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