Caitlin Flanagan

Mothers ... would do anything to steer their daughter the right way. It is frustrating beyond measure for them when a daughter…

— Caitlin Flanagan

Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where…

— Caitlin Flanagan

In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child.…

— Caitlin Flanagan

Planning a wedding is hell. Things are said. Doors are slammed. Quarrels about the most inconsequential things--yellow tablecloths or white? hors d'oeuvres…

— Caitlin Flanagan

Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and…

— Caitlin Flanagan

“There is a paradox at the heart of contemporary Girl Land, and this paradox makes the emotional experience of female adolescence more…

— Caitlin Flanagan

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

— Caitlin Flanagan

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

— Caitlin Flanagan

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

— Caitlin Flanagan

Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.

— Caitlin Flanagan

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

— Caitlin Flanagan

My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.

— Caitlin Flanagan

“Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention; Girl Land is the place and time in which…

— Caitlin Flanagan

What the altar-bound of today end up buying from their numberless vendors is a dog's breakfast of bridal excess - part society…

— Caitlin Flanagan

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

— Caitlin Flanagan

To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept…

— Caitlin Flanagan

My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can…

— Caitlin Flanagan

Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.

— Caitlin Flanagan

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

— Caitlin Flanagan

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was…

— Caitlin Flanagan

Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.

— Caitlin Flanagan

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

— Caitlin Flanagan

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children…

— Caitlin Flanagan

I used to teach at a private school, and the parents thought I loved their children. I did not love their children!…

— Caitlin Flanagan