Shopgirl

I read Shopgirl yesterday. All of it. It's pretty short. 130 pages or so.

It made me ache. Perhaps it was just my cold, but my chest felt heavy up and my throat contracted. I didn't have the urge to cry, though. Shopgirl was an easy, enjoyable read, and I felt like I could understand each of the characters. They made sense. They were real. However, that didn't make me like all of them. I'm sure I pulled a lot of personal grudges into my reading, as we all do with every book we read, but I just wanted to grab Mirabelle (the titular character) by the shoulders and shout, "run! Get away now!" But at the same time, of course I knew that even if she were real and I had yelled at her, she wouldn't have listened. These mistakes must just be something that girls of a certain age contend with, though, many girls I know have lucked out or just been smart enough to not get into these situations. Perhaps some of us are destined for this muck.

Anyway, it made me think about a time in my life I haven't thought about in a good while, and fortunately, I feel like I got some closure from this story. Flipping the last "page" in my Kindle felt like putting that part of my life in a box and putting the box up on a shelf in a closet I don't go in often. And I feel pretty good about that.

Thanks, Steve Martin.