Mad as a Hatter

I keep trying to get away from this book - Anthropology of an American Girl - but there's something addictive about it. I think about putting it down, returning it to the library, but each night, I pick it up, can't help but read more.

I blame this book for my present madness. People ask, how have you been, and all I can answer is restless. Mad as a hatter. But this book is not promoting the restlessness per se. This girl, constructing herself, is lost in the swirl of her own thoughts; introspective and self-aware, but innocent, ignorant to the outside forces. Knowledgeable but blind.

I've read books that make me think, but often they are political, racial, cultural. This one is strictly, painfully, personal. Waifish white East Coaster, and she's forcing me to think about romance, sanity, my self-structuring. And while this girl, Evie, represents my coiled self, I alternate reading the one with Henry and June, and Anais, well, she stirs the longing to uncoil, madly, into sensuality. Indulgence.