Patty Jane's House of Curl

by Lorna Landvik

A book about two sisters and their relationships with men, each other, and the people who come to the beauty parlor the one sister owns told from the view point of a daughter. It's a good book, but sad too.

Quotes I liked:

"Honey, life can be a ballroom dance, or it can be full of shit, either way your job in both cases is to watch where you step."

"How old are you Ione?"
"Fifty-one"
"You don't seem that old"
"I don't think I'm that old. Mostly I feel I am nineteen."

"I just can't see myself as anything but young."
"When you're young that's how you think. But once you get not so young, you find out getting old is not so bad...even better. There is inside all of us the soul of an eight year old. Time and experience and motherhood-especially motherhood because my stars then you're in charge of someone else- make you wiser, but underneath it all is still that little eight year old center. Your age is often a number without meaning."

"To be good to yourself, sometimes it takes a special talent all its own."

"Most of the gals who come in here are looking for something more in their lives. Yes, even the church-going ones. Most of these women have husbands and children and a yearning they just can't put their fingers on. See they're all looking for something but they don't know what it is."
"Love" said Harriet.
"Happiness" piped in Ione.
"Fun?" said Nora.
"All good answers, but to get them, you need one basic thing, a sense of self. A sense that we're not just mothers or children or wives or girlfriends."
"Nora's ten year old heart pounded thinking there wasn't a person on the entire planet she could love as much as her mother."

(I miss being that "entire love" of my kids. Those were the days!)

"Then Nora became a teenager, and to her mother it seemed as if her daughter had crossed a street, leaving her explicit instructions not to follow." "It's just a phase" reassured Dixie, mother of four. "What do you expect?" "Common courtesy, a little respect." Dixie hooted, "Where you from Patty Jane? Mars? "

"There was relatively little that could effect Patty Jane's opinion of herself, but criticism from her daughter scratched and stuck to her like burrs on wool socks."

"A decision flamed in her mind. Until I can handle things, I'll pretend I can handle things. The simplicity of the plan astonished her, she felt the same exuberance as when she figured out an algebra problem. She repeated the new formula to herself, Until I can handle things, I'll pretend I can handle things."