This great line, from The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolizter, makes me wonder if anyone else stops mid-sentence to savor the written word. I mean, really, this line poked me in the heart. The author brilliantly paired ideas that can only exist in someone’s imagination and yet it created an image so clear in my mind that I instantly understood what the author was trying to say. Then again, maybe I have no idea what the author meant. I recently heard Alice Hoffman speak and she told a crowd of over three hundred people that it doesn’t matter what she, as an author, is trying to say – it only matters what the reader thinks. Every reader interprets things differently, that’s the beauty of literature!

So, this particular line may have drawn readers in for different reasons or not drawn them in at all. I realize that it may have spoken so loudly to me simply because I have a mother that has a calming effect on my world. I thought of my mother pressing her lips to my forehead to check my temperature, just as I do with my own two children. It made me wonder how any mother’s love, imperfect as it can be, can start out pure and well-intentioned and yet turn misguided and jaded or mistake-ridden and self-deprecating. And yet, in its purest most innate form, yes, I believe a mother’s hand, her unconditional love and strength, could surely pass over the hot head of the world and solve a whole hell of a lot of problems.  

Thanks, Meg Wolitzer, this is one great line.

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