To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female. — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader. — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
Mothers ... would do anything to steer their daughter the right way. It is frustrating beyond measure for them when a daughter screams, 'You… — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel… — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also… — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
Planning a wedding is hell. Things are said. Doors are slammed. Quarrels about the most inconsequential things--yellow tablecloths or white? hors d'oeuvres set out… — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your… — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
“There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary Girl Land, and this paradox makes the emotional experience of female adolescence more intense and… — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence. — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself. — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self. — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys. — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you. — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California. — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
“Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention; Girl Land is the place and time in which all of… — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
What the altar-bound of today end up buying from their numberless vendors is a dog's breakfast of bridal excess - part society wedding of… — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented. — Caitlin Flanagan Copy Share Image
