Week 4 Part 1

page 163:

"Late August. You are pregnant. Again. You knew this would happen. You think, This is God's little joke. God will continue to play this joke for several more years, a cruel reminder that life happens, that the laws of nature will knock you on your arrogant ass no matter how hard you fight. You wait. When waiting is too much, you fall down the stairs when no one is home, an easy dive, belly down. Body still weak enough got such an old trick. Flush the red matter away. No tears. The uneasy guilt and cringe in you chest are not for the baby but for the breasts that are tender, a trace of blue veins, fat. They will shrink, you assure yourself over and over. Shrink."

In this quote Marya uses second person to describe something that is happening to the first person point of view. I think that she does this to show the seperation she feels from herself. The quote is describes vividly the pain she puts herself in even without starving herself.

page 202:

"Sex is not expirenced so much as seen, and this translation of physical experience into intellectual excersize made sex tolerable. Hugs are different, however. Kissign is perhaps more intimate than sex itself. Similarly, hugs imply emotional, rather than sexual, intimacy. They are a gesture from one person to anotehr of nonsexual carign, and the idea of ebing cared for in a nonsexual way was not soemthing I could understand. Contact with another person reminds you that you are also a person, and implies that someone cares about you as such. This felt so profoundly false, and i felt I did not, in any way warrant such a care, such contact. Contact with another body reminds you that you have a body, a fact you are trying very hard to forget. "

Marya is deathly afraid of intimacy in any form. The things she can tolerate, like sex, are when she feels least connected to her body. Marya has described earlier that when seh is having sex she feels as if she watching from across the room, not expirencing it first hand. The importance of this quote is recognizing that she recognizes her own fear of the body and its emotions.