Becoming
by Michelle Obama
细碎感悟
从小时候开始回忆。生活中的方方面面，快乐与忧愁，家人对她少年性格的塑造和她个人从小就展现出来的斗志。一点一滴娓娓道来，再加上她本人亲自朗读，让人听着忍不住对她的各种喜怒哀乐产生强烈共鸣。跨种族，跨文化，跨时空。
游泳时候听，听完倍儿感动，强行游到1500米，期间还在水中落泪。
Michelle Obama’s Big Moment
听了米歇尔提到的这篇改变一切的丹佛助选演讲，感觉整本becoming的就是根据这篇演讲扩写的。镜头数次对准米歇尔的妈妈，无法想象彼时她的内心多么为自己的女儿自豪。
能看出十年前面对这么大基数人群的演讲米歇尔还是略显紧张，偶尔还有黑人口音，不知道是不是为了赢得共鸣特意加上去的。
看到米歇尔在帮助奥巴马竞选
一路走来
最后奥巴马终于成为总统，历史性的夜晚，特意去YouTube上看了奥巴马当年的胜选讲话
那个时候才47岁
长得又帅，说话声音低沉，演讲内容又是细节打动你又是排比句yes we can煽动你
芝加哥格兰特公园现场来了20W人
看的热泪盈眶热血沸腾
瞬间精神美国人
–
买了实体书收藏。
摘抄
Becoming Me
“He’s two years old and already the portrait of brotherly vigilance and responsibility—his arm extended toward mine, his fingers wrapped protectively around my fat wrist.”
“Terry still lived in a state of numbed formality—impeccably dressed, remotely servile, never asserting himself in any way, at least that I would see. It was as if he’d surrendered a part of himself as a way of coping”
“she represented a rigid kind of authority I hadn’t yet encountered elsewhere. She demanded excellence from every kid who sat on her piano bench”
“When you’re little, a piano can look like it has a thousand keys. You’re staring at an expanse of black and white that stretches farther than two small arms can reach”
“All I’d done was try to learn more and faster, but Robbie viewed it as a crime approaching treason”
“Looking back on it now, I think my parents appreciated my feistiness and I’m glad for it. It was a flame inside me they wanted to keep lit.”
“My family made trips into the heart of the city only a handful of times a year, to visit the Art Institute or see a play, the four of us traveling like astronauts in the capsule of my dad’s Buick.”
“My father loved any excuse to drive. He was devoted to his car, a bronze-colored two-door Buick Electra 225, which he referred to with pride as “the Deuce and a Quarter.”
“He kept it buffed and waxed and was religious about the maintenance schedule”
“Even at a young age, there was something about my grandmother’s silence and passivity in her relationship with Dandy that got under my skin”
“I’d inherited myself, though I hoped in a less abrasive form”
“If this were an American Dream story, Dandy, who arrived in Chicago in the early 1930s, would have found a good job and a pathway to college. But the reality was far different”
“This particular form of discrimination altered the destinies of generations of African Americans, including many of the men in my family, limiting their income, their opportunity, and, eventually, their aspirations”
“These were highly intelligent, able-bodied men who were denied access to stable high-paying jobs”
“But I knew what she was getting at. There was no denying it, even if I just had. I did speak differently than some of my relatives, and so did Craig. Our parents had drilled into us the importance of using proper diction, of saying “going” instead of “goin’ ” and “isn’t” instead of “ain’t.” We were taught to finish off our words. They bought us a dictionary and a full Encyclopedia Britannica set, which lived on a shelf in the stairwell to our apartment, its titles etched in gold. Any time we had a question about a word, or a concept, or some piece of history, they directed us toward those books”
“Yet it also could be problematic. Speaking a certain way—the “white” way, as some would have it—was perceived as a betrayal, as being uppity, as somehow denying our culture”
“America would bring to Barack Obama the same questions my cousin was unconsciously putting to me that day on the stoop: Are you what you appear to be? Do I trust you or not?”
“My mother maintained the sort of parental mind-set that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossible to emulate—a kind of unflappable Zen neutrality.”
“She wasn’t quick to judge and she wasn’t quick to meddle. Instead, she monitored our moods and bore benevolent witness to whatever travails or triumphs a day might bring.”
“Every move she made, I realize now, was buttressed by the quiet confidence that she’d raised us to be adults”
“Both were beautiful girls—Diane was fair-skinned, and Pam was darker—each with a kind of self-possessed grace that seemed to come naturally. Even their little sister, Gina, who was a few years younger, emanated a robust femininity that I came to think of simply as Gore-like”
“we somehow had decided we liked each other”
“Much later, my mother would tell me that every year when spring came and the air warmed up in Chicago, she entertained thoughts about leaving my father. I don’t know if these thoughts were actually serious or not. I don’t know if she considered the idea for an hour, or for a day, or for most of the season, but for her it was an active fantasy, something that felt healthy and maybe even energizing to ponder, almost as ritual.”
“I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.”
“It was like stepping onstage at your first piano recital and realizing that you’d never played anything but an instrument with broken keys. Your world shifts, but you’re asked to adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone else.”
“New York overwhelmed me. It was fast and noisy, a less patient place than Chicago. But Czerny was full of life there, unfazed by jaywalking pedestrians and the smell of urine and stacked garbage wafting from the curb.”
“But my hesitancy only triggered something in Czerny that I will forever associate with New Yorkers—an instinctive and immediate push back against thinking small. She climbed out of the car, giving me no choice but to drive. Get over it and just live a little was her message.”
“I was learning how to write efficiently, how to think critically. ”
“Whatever deficits I might have arrived with, coming from an inner-city high school, it seemed that I could make up for them by putting in extra time, asking for help when I needed it, and learning to pace myself and not procrastinate.”
“It was hardly a straight meritocracy. There were the athletes, for example. There were the legacy kids, whose fathers and grandfathers had been Tigers or whose families had funded the building of a dorm or a library.”
“I also learned that being rich didn’t protect you from failure. Around me, I saw students flaming out(〈informal, NA〉失败; 溃败; 惨败)—white, black, privileged or not. Some were seduced by weeknight keg parties, some were crushed by the stress of trying to live up to some scholarly ideal, and others were just plain lazy or so out of their element they needed to flee. My job, as I saw it, was to hold steady, earn the best grades I could, and get myself through.
“Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.”
“Just as it had been at Whitney Young, my intensity was spawned at least in part by a feeling of I’ll show you. If in high school I’d felt as if I were representing my neighborhood, now at Princeton I was representing my race. ”
“Being around children had a wonderful obliterative effect, wiping out school stress, forcing me out of my head and into the moment.”
“I remembered the thick heat of the place and the heavy green drape of Spanish moss on the live oaks, the cypress trees rising from the swamps and the old men fishing on the muddy creeks. There were insects in Georgetown, alarming numbers of them, buzzing and whirring in the evening air like little helicopters.”
“Somewhere in the background was another more-than-decent likelihood—that they, like me, were descended from slaves.”
“The same was true for many of my friends at Princeton, but I was also coming to understand that there were other versions of being black in America. I was meeting kids from East Coast cities whose roots were Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican.”
“Beneath my laid-back college-kid demeanor, I lived like a half-closeted CEO, quietly but unswervingly focused on achievement, bent on checking every box. My to-do list lived in my head and went with me everywhere. I assessed my goals, analyzed my outcomes, counted my wins. If there was a challenge to vault, I’d vault it. ”
“Kevin, I’d thought, was headed to medical school, but then he swerved, deciding to put off schooling and instead pursue a sideline interest in becoming a sports mascot.”
hhhhhhhhh“What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work.”
“Barack Obama had already created a stir at the firm. For one thing, he’d just finished his first year of law school, and normally we only hired second-year students for summer positions. But rumor had it he was exceptional. Word had spread that one of his professors at Harvard—the daughter of a managing partner—claimed he was the most gifted law student she’d ever encountered. Some of the secretaries who’d seen the guy come in for his interview were saying that on top of this apparent brilliance he was also cute.”
“Compared with my own lockstep march toward success, the direct arrow shot of my trajectory from Princeton to Harvard to my desk on the forty-seventh floor, Barack’s path was an improvisational zigzag through disparate worlds”
literature and philosophy in a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on Sundays
He was in law school, he explained, because grassroots organizing had shown him that meaningful societal change required not just the work of the people on the ground but stronger policies and governmental action as well.
Despite my resistance to the hype that had preceded him, I found myself admiring Barack for both his self-assuredness and his earnest demeanor
He sauntered around with calm detachment, which seemed only to increase his appeal
knew that he consumed volumes of political philosophy as if it were beach reading, that he spent all his spare change on books
probably too cerebral for most people to put up with.
“He was looking at me curiously, with the trace of a smile.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked.
And with that, I leaned in and everything felt clear.”
Becoming Us
about my life and career and even about Barack himself seemed to fall away with that first kiss, replaced by a driving need to know him better, to explore and experience everything about him as fast as I could.
His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind. He read late into the night, often long after I’d fallen asleep, plowing through history and biographies and Toni Morrison, too. He read several newspapers daily, cover to cover.
I sensed already that he was more at home with the unruliness of the world than I was, more willing to let it all in without distress
Work, during this time, felt like a distraction—the thing we had to do before we were allowed to charge back toward each other again.
Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.
And yet Barack was loved deeply. His grandparents on Oahu doted on both him and his younger half sister Maya
The fact he’d navigated his unusual upbringing so successfully seemed only to reinforce the idea that he was ready to take on more.
I’d made my parents and grandparents proud. But listening to Barack, I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.
He’d been chosen as an editor on the Harvard Law Review, a monthly student-run journal that was considered one of the top legal publications in the country.
He was living in a spartan one-bedroom apartment in Somerville, but during my recruiting trips Sidley put me up at the luxe Charles Hotel adjacent to campus, where we slept on smooth high-quality sheets and Barack, rarely one to cook for himself, could load up on a hot breakfast before his morning classes. In the evenings, he parked himself in my room and did his schoolwork, giddily dressed in one of the hotel’s thick terry-cloth robes.
At Christmastime that year, we flew to Honolulu. I’d never been to Hawaii before but was pretty certain I’d like it. I was coming from Chicago, after all, where winter stretched through April, where it was normal to keep a snow shovel stashed in the trunk of your car. I owned an unsettling amount of wool. For me, getting away from winter had always felt like a joyride. During college, I’d made a trip to the Bahamas with my Bahamian classmate David, and another to Jamaica with Suzanne. In both instances, I’d reveled in the soft air on my skin and the simple buoyancy I felt anytime I got close to the ocean. Maybe it was no accident that I was drawn to people who’d been raised on islands.
Without needing to discuss it outright, I knew he could handle a partner who had her own passions and voice. These were things you couldn’t teach in a relationship, things that not even love could really build or change.
I remember listening to this sentence riding the shuttle home, with mellow sunshine in a typical spring afternoonI’m not sure that I ever believed that life was fair, but I had always thought that you could work your way out of just about any problem. Suzanne’s cancer was the first real challenge to that notion, a sabotage of my ideals. Because even if I didn’t have the specifics nailed down yet, I did have ideas about the future. I had that agenda I’d been assiduously maintaining since freshman year of college, stemming from the neat line of boxes I was meant to check.
For me and Suzanne, it was supposed to go like this: We’d be the maids of honor at each other’s weddings. Our husbands would be really different, of course, but they’d like each other a lot anyway. We’d have babies at the same time, take family beach trips to Jamaica, remain mildly critical of each other’s parenting techniques, and be favorite fun aunties to each other’s kids as they grew. I’d get her kids books for their birthdays; she’d get mine pogo sticks. We’d laugh and share secrets and roll our eyes at what we perceived as the other person’s ridiculous idiosyncrasies, until one day we’d realize we were two old ladies who’d been best friends forever, flummoxed suddenly by where the time had gone.
It was bad luck, bad fortune, freakish to the point of being too scary to contemplate.
- It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
- The whole exercise of recording one’s thoughts was new to me—a habit I’d picked up in part, I suppose, from Barack, who viewed writing as therapeutic and clarifying and had kept journals on and off over the years.
Craig had already assessed Barack’s character in the most thorough and revealing way he could—by including him in a high-octane(高强度的) weekend basketball game with a bunch of his buddies, most of them former college players
It turned out that Barack was also the first African American in the publication’s 103-year history to be selected—a milestone so huge that it had been written up in the New York Times, accompanied by a photo of Barack, smiling in a scarf and winter coat.
奥巴马是《哈佛法律评论》百年以来第一位黑人主编。
- Ultimately, the chemical case was settled out of court, which meant that much of my document reviewing had been for nothing. This was an irksome but expected trade-off in the legal field, where it was not uncommon to prepare for a trial that never came to pass.
Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit. I doubt that my parents, in their thirty years together, had even once discussed it
We were both, of course, products of how we’d been raised. Barack had experienced marriage as ephemeral: His mother had married twice, divorced twice, and in each instance managed to move on with her life, career, and young children intact. My parents, meanwhile, had locked in early and for life. For them, every decision was a joint decision, every endeavor a joint endeavor. In thirty years, they’d hardly spent a night apart.
We wanted a modern partnership that suited us both. He saw marriage as the loving alignment of two people who could lead parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams or ambitions. For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal.
Keeping his gaze on me, my father lifted the back of my hand to his lips and kissed it again and again and again. It was his way of saying, Hush now, don’t cry. He was expressing sorrow and urgency, but also something calmer and deeper, a message he wanted to make clear. With those kisses, he was saying that he loved me with his whole heart, that he was proud of the woman I’d become. He was saying that he knew he should have gone to the doctor a lot sooner. He was asking for forgiveness. He was saying good-bye.
米歇尔爸爸去世这一段看的泪流满面😭I was realizing that the next phase of my journey would not simply unfold on its own, that my fancy academic degrees weren’t going to automatically lead me to fulfilling work. Finding a career as opposed to a job wouldn’t just come from perusing the contact pages of an alumni directory; it required deeper thought and effort. I would need to hustle and learn.
I was almost too miffed to even look down, but when I did, I saw a dark velvet box where the chocolate cake was supposed to be. Inside it was a diamond ring.
求婚啦
Well, in my mind, we can conquer the world / In love you and I, you and I, you and I…
She was a tiny person, a person entrusted to us. I was heady with the responsibility of it, fully in her thrall. I could lose an hour just watching her breathe. When there’s a baby in the house, time stretches and contracts, abiding by none of the regular rules. A single day can feel endless, and then suddenly six months have blown right past. Barack and I laughed about what parenthood had done to us
Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred.
The media response to Barack’s speech was hyperbolic. “I’ve just seen the first black president,” Chris Matthews declared to his fellow commentators on NBC. A front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune the next day read simply, “The Phenom.” Barack’s cell phone began to ring nonstop. Cable pundits were dubbing him a “rock star” and an “overnight success,” as if he hadn’t spent years working up to that moment onstage, as if the speech had created him instead of the other way around
It wasn’t long before I became less concerned with making sure Malia and Sasha looked like the daughters of a future president than making sure they looked like they at least had a mother.
It was a small triumph, but a triumph nonetheless, and it was mine.
This was the call-and-response of democracy, I realized, a contract forged person by person. You show up for us, and we’ll show up for you.
the context it provided. And in general, he’s just not someone who’s easily rattled or thrown off course by anything as abstract as doubt or hurt.
I considered myself a confident, successful woman, but I was also the same kid who used to tell people she planned to be a pediatrician and devoted herself to setting perfect attendance records at school. In other words, I cared what people thought.
I could see now that there was a performative piece to politics that I hadn’t yet fully mastered.
declaring that Barack Hussein Obama would become the forty-fourth president of the United States.
Things felt slow and aqueous and slightly distorted
Daddy,” she said, sounding almost apologetic. “There’s no one on the road. I don’t think anyone’s coming to your celebration
awwwwwwwAnd they were. More than 200,000 people had crammed into the park to see us
Becoming More
In 2009, we’d put on the first-ever White House poetry and spoken-word event, listening as a young composer named Lin-Manuel Miranda stood up and astonished everyone with a piece from a project he was just beginning to put together, describing it as a “concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop…Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.” I remember shaking his hand and saying, “Hey, good luck with the Hamilton thing.”
Who would have thought!!! Hamilton!!!The White House reminds me of a museum and it’s like, how do you sleep in a museum?”
From now on, wherever he went, he’d be closely trailed by a military aide carrying a forty-five-pound briefcase containing launch authentication codes and sophisticated communications devices, often referred to as the nuclear football.
I was now FLOTUS—First Lady of the United States—to Barack’s POTUS. It was time to celebrate.
He now had about fifty staffers reading and answering his mail. He had Marine helicopter pilots standing by to him anywhere he needed to go, and a six-person team that organized thick briefing books so he could stay current on the issues and make educated decisions. He had a crew of chefs looking after his nutrition, and a handful of grocery shoppers who safeguarded us from any sort of food sabotage by making anonymous runs to different stores, picking up supplies without ever revealing whom they worked for.
总统后勤无双Most amusing to me was the fact that he now had three personal military valets whose duties included standing watch over his closet, making sure his shoes were shined, his shirts pressed, his gym clothes always fresh and folded. Life in the White House was very different from life in the Hole.
He was no longer smoking, thankfully, though he’d often chew a piece of nicotine gum. Most nights of the week, he stayed at his desk until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, reading memos, rewriting speeches, and responding to email while ESPN played low on the TV. He always took a break to come kiss me and the girls good night.
tried to make our daughters’ exposure to the wider world as positive as possible, realizing that Barack and I had a unique opportunity to show them history up close. When Barack had foreign trips that coincided with school vacations, we traveled as a family, knowing it would be educational. In the summer of 2009, we’d brought them on a trip that included visits to the Kremlin in Moscow and the Vatican in Rome. In the span of seven days, they’d met the Russian president, toured the Pantheon and the Roman Colosseum, and passed through the “Door of No Return” in Ghana, the departure point for untold numbers of Africans who’d been sold into slavery.
educational...I tried not to worry, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.
米歇尔：永不原谅川普We wanted to highlight the importance of exposing children to the arts, showing that it’s not a luxury but a necessity to their overall educational experience
Anytime I went somewhere without a fuss, it felt like a small victory, an exercise of free will. I was a detail person, after all. I hadn’t forgotten how gratifying it could be to tick through the minutiae of a shopping list. Maybe six months after the PetSmart trip, I made a giddy incognito run to the local Target, dressed in a baseball cap and sunglasses. My security detail wore shorts and sneakers and ditched their earpieces, doing their best not to stand out as they trailed me and my assistant Kristin Jones through the store. We wandered every single aisle. I selected some Oil of Olay face cream and new toothbrushes. We got dryer sheets and laundry detergent for Kristin, and I found a couple of games for Sasha and Malia. And for the first time in several years, I was able to pick out a card to give to Barack on our anniversary.
“ The problem for me was that the cell service on my BlackBerry had somehow disconnected, never sending out my messages or downloading updates from others.”
Blackberry: ???
- “My husband needed me. This would be the only time in eight years that he’d request my presence in the middle of a workday, the two of us rearranging our schedules to be alone together for a moment of dim comfort.”
- “What a lot of people don’t know is that the president sees almost everything, or is at least privy to basically any available information related to the country’s well-being. ”
You got somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be. I’d known the guy for only a couple of months then, but in retrospect I see now that this was my swerve. In that moment, without saying a word, I’d signed on for a lifetime of us, and a lifetime of this.
As was always the case, we were briefed on the protocol ahead of time: We’d greet the royals formally before getting into their vehicle to make the short drive. I’d sit in the front next to ninety-four-year-old Prince Philip, who would drive, and Barack would sit next to the Queen in the backseat. It would be the first time in more than eight years that the two of us had been driven by anyone other than a Secret Service agent, or ridden in a car together without agents. This seemed to matter to our security teams, the same way the protocol mattered to the advance teams, who fretted endlessly over our movements and interactions, making sure that every last little thing looked right and went smoothly.
“Did they give you some rule about this?” she said, dismissing all the fuss with a wave of her hand. “That’s rubbish. Sit wherever you want.”
hhhhhhhhh
“Traveling with us did have its advantages. Before Barack’s presidency was over, our girls would enjoy a baseball game in Havana, walk along the Great Wall of China, and visit the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio one evening in magical, misty darkness.”
As I slept, the news was confirmed: American voters had elected Donald Trump to succeed Barack as the next president of the United States. I wanted to not know that fact for as long as I possibly could.
Through my work with Jill Biden on Joining Forces, we’d helped persuade businesses to hire or train more than 1.5 million veterans and military spouses. Following through on one of the very first concerns I’d heard on the campaign trail, we’d gotten all fifty states to collaborate on professional licensing agreements, which would help keep military spouses’ careers from stalling every time they moved. On education, Barack and I had leveraged billions of dollars to help girls around the world get the schooling they deserve. More than twenty-eight hundred Peace Corps volunteers were now trained to implement programs for girls internationally. And in the United States, my team and I had helped more young people sign up for federal student aid, supported school counselors, and elevated College Signing Day to a national level. Barack, meanwhile, had managed to reverse the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. He’d helped to broker the Paris Agreement on climate change, brought tens of thousands of troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and led the effort to effectively shut down Iran’s nuclear program. Twenty million more people had the security of health insurance. And we’d managed two terms in office without a major scandal. We had held ourselves and the people who worked with us to the highest standards of ethics and decency, and we’d made it all the way through”
Six months before the garden dedication, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the young composer I’d met at one of our first arts events, returned to the White House. His hip-hop riff on Alexander Hamilton had exploded into a Broadway sensation, and with it he’d become a global superstar. Hamilton was a musical celebration of America’s history and diversity, recasting our understanding of the roles minorities play in our national story, highlighting the importance of women who’d long been overshadowed by powerful men. I’d seen it off-Broadway and loved it so much that I went to see it again when it hit the big stage. It was catchy and funny, heart swelling and heartbreaking—the best piece of art in any form that I’d ever encountered.
Oh HamiltonAnd I will always wonder about what led so many women, in particular, to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president. But the result was now ours to live with.
A transition is exactly that—a passage to something new. A hand goes on a Bible; an oath gets repeated. One president’s furniture gets carried out while another’s comes in. Closets are emptied and refilled
Because people often ask, I’ll say it here directly: I have no intention of running for office, ever. I’ve never been a fan of politics, and my experience over the last ten years has done little to change that. I continue to be put off by the nastiness—the tribal segregation of red and blue, this idea that we’re supposed to choose one side and stick to it, unable to listen and compromise, or sometimes even to be civil.
词汇
“None of this really registered with me”
“faulty gene”
“his barrage of complaints”
“caught only in glimmers”
“For me, Bryn Mawr was practically an extension of home.”
“she did a ritualistic spring cleaning”
“peripheral presence”
“modest practicality”
“I learned to keep my gaze fixed firmly ahead anytime I passed a group of men clustered on a street corner, careful not to register their eyes roving over my chest and legs”
“double-park”
carrel: （图书馆里供单个读者或学生使用的带桌的）小单间。
be transfixed with terror: 吓呆了
pull off the look
gossamer
- smitten
The sun-bleached mellowness of the island
juggling
a slow-growing certainty
Everything about her radiated competence and calm
leaving the city in what felt like a perpetual state of dampness
It was the height of summer
stereo sound of crickets （蟋蟀立体声）