- Jan 2024
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Local file Local fileYellowface119
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Heart hammering, I pull up Twitter and search “Geoffrey Carlino” tosee what Athena’s ex-boyfriend has been up to lately.
HELP HIMM?
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She was too pretty, too successful,too suspiciously clean to have nothing on her ledger. She had it coming forher,
its still so weird to see her talk about her llike this
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He doesn’t ask any more questions. Tom, bless him, takes everythingat face value. So does Rory. I feel a deep pang of affection for them rightthen. There’s no guile in this family; just open, loving trust,
dawg your all going to jail
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The SpiderwickChronicles
ok but i loved that movie
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Hey, Tom? Could you trace theIP address of, like, any random Twitter account?
good lord women calm tf down omg wait what if she gets arrested
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TikTok-obsessed basic bitch in training.
why is she calling her a bbitch
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“Well, sure. But that’s just Wonder Woman; that’s not seriousliterature.
oh but captain america is?
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And it’s so crazy to call Chelsea a racist—I mean,she’s a Democrat. She voted for Obama
WHATT
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Islamicmysticism
why does she call it mysticism...
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Ailin for her thoughts onBridgerton.
oh thats a crazy topic change
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“So you have a problemwith unacknowledged Asian labor?”
oo get her
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release of the French edition ofThe Last Front
"if you got the french edition then your doing something wrong"
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oom where ithappens
hamil-gunshots
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This dress is Juniper Song’s villainorigin story
LMAO
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How much do you want to bet she loves the IDF, too?
june would so be pro israel tho
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You lost that right when you let a white man colonize yourcunt.
THATS CRAZYYY
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a YA writer wasdriven off social media for encouraging her fans to leave one-star reviewson another writer’s debut
CAIT CORRAIN
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I know some authors who have been able to jump from scandal toscandal with their reputations perfectly intact. Mostly white.
jk rowling...
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What happened to critical reading skills
she sounds like that one author on twt who does hot takes she mentoned before
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All I did was write once that I couldn’trelate to an Indian writer’s romance novel, because all the characters wereunlikable and way too obsessed with their family duties to the point ofdisbelief
mf its a desi family ofc its gonna be unlikable
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The literal definition of yellowface,
title drop
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reyl089.
WHY IS IT ALWAYS REYLOS
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There’s then a heated debate over whether it’s appropriate to use thewords “lynch mob” when describing a white woman, and it ends withdozens of people calling the above referenced author a racist. Said author’saccount is locked within hours.
stop this is so twt
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It’s notlike these two things are connected.
huh?? is the asian director involved?
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Wikipedia page about me. They’ll writeendless think pieces about me
stop this made me laugh
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The first tweet comes from an account named @Athena LiusGhost,created earlier this week; no profile picture, no words in the bio:Juniper Song, aka June Hayward, did not write The Last Front. I did. She stole my book, stolemy voice, and stole my words. #SaveAthena.
pop off queen
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Why not the world
why not hell
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arm in arm with the handsome Asian actor they cast to play AGeng
ick
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“It’s a translation, really.And translation across mediums is inherently unfaithful to some extent.Roland Barthes. An act of translation is an act of betrayal.”
helpp babel
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“You are exactly right,” he says. “We need you. My English, it is notso good. Your generation has very good English. You can tell them ourstory. Make sure they remember us.” He nods, determined. “Yes. Make surethey remember us.”
kms this poor man
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t makes me feelrotten
you should feel rotton
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Great Wall Express
great wall😭vzhen
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I want to die. I want toopen the car door and roll out onto the highway and be obliterated byoncoming traffic
I WISH YOUD DIED TOO
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Kim Jong Un’s girlboss propagandist sisterimmediately comes to mind, only because I’d once seen a news photographof her wearing a similar suit and sunglasses
THESE COMPARISONS MAN
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get that they’re armymen, and they’re uncouth, but this feels like tragedy porn,
poppy war critics
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domino theory
domino theory is that if communism happened in one country then it would spread to others, funny how the west is scared of this when its what it did with democracy
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Profiting from someone else’s suffering. God, what a cruel way to putit. Athena used to struggle with this, publicly, performatively.
bitch YOU are doing this
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I often rehearse pretendarguments in the shower.
only thing i relate to
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Annie Watersmeme,” which involves pictures of bland and mediocre-looking whitewomen paired with the caption, taken from the book, “She was a litheyoung thing, with hair the color of the rising sun and eyes like the ocean,and the men could not keep their eyes off her as she floated past
i would love to take part in it; y/n typa description
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“For my next video,” drawls Kimberly Deng, “I will be doing anAnnie Waters makeup tutorial, featuring a turmeric face mask and whitetears.”
ok but i would watch her
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Annie Waters—a character I’d expandedfrom Athena’s draft, the seventeen-year-old daughter of YMCAmissionaries—visits the laborers’ camp alone to hand out Bibles andChristmas biscuits. The men, who haven’t seen their wives or any womenof their kind in months, understandably ogle over her. She’s blonde, slim,and pretty; of course they can’t get enough of her. One asks if he can kissher on the cheek, and since it’s Christmastime, she bashfully permits it.I thought the scene was touching. Here we have people divided bylanguage and race, who are nonetheless able to share a tender moment inthe middle of a war. The scene also fixed an earlier gripe Daniella had withthe novel, which was that it centered almost entirely on men. The era of themacho war story is over, she’d written. We need to start elevating femaleperspectives.
can they just kill themselves
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Also, what’s The Untamed?
LMAO SHE DONT EVEN KNOW
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“one of themany white women, like those who write queer fan fiction of The Untamed,who not only have an unexamined fetish for feminine-looking Asian men,but who think Chinese history is something to cherry-pick from in search ofintriguing and shiny nuggets, like nice Ming vases to set in the corner.”
help this is kinda funny
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“I am white,” I say, more frostily than I’d intended. What is sheinsinuating? That I can’t be a good mentor to her unless I’m Asian?
no your trying to come off as asian and associating with a lot of asians too
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I am a woman who helps otherwomen.
oh she calls herself a girls girl...
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Right,” I say. I’m a little surprised Heidi knows the word “subaltern.”“And without us, these stories wouldn’t get told.”“Precisely. Precisely.
YES THEY WOULD BY ACTUAL POCS
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Japanese art history, meaning tentacleporn,
WHAT
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It takes me a minute to realize that the first person I would have called,the only person who would have understood this news for what it was, andwouldn’t have reacted with petty jealousy or feigned support, is Athena.
and this is how you treat the one person close to you...
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yields only one new tweet in the past hour,written by someone I assume is a random audience member:
this reminds me of if you could see the sun
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Athena.Blood thunders in my ears. I blink several times, hoping desperatelyshe’s an apparition, but every time I open my eyes she’s still there, smilingexpectantly at me with bright, berry-red lips.
huh?? guilty consciene
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“Of course everything I wrote in college was utter tripe, becausecollege students don’t know how to write about anything other than theromance of being a college student.
real
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And though I would never say this out loud about a fellow woman—theindustry is tough enough as it is—I hope I got that bitch fired.
i hope you get fired
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and this gives me some moral discomfort,
oh so now you feel unmoral
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I ball both hands intofists and jump high into the air.
oh kill yourself
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I decry what’s happening inXinjiang. I Stand with Hong Kong. I start gaining dozens more followers aday once I’ve started vocalizing on these matters, and when I notice thatmany of my followers are people of color or have things like #BLM and#FreePalestine in their bios, I know I’m on the right track.
i hate her man
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which makes me look sortof racially ambiguous
internal screaming
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Or was beef nowreserved only for Discord?
the fake reviewers girl who did both
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Jesus Christ. Cultural appropriation? Cultural leeching? What is herproblem?
mf shes trying to protect you atleast
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Candice Lee, Daniella’s editorial assistant, is the only person at Edenwho doesn’t like me. She never makes it so evident that I have grounds tocomplain about it—she’s unfailingly polite in emails, she likes and retweetseverything I post about the book on social media, and she always greets mewith a smile during videoconference meetings. But I can tell it’s all forced—there’s something in her pinched expression, the curtness of her words.Maybe she knew Athena. Maybe she’s one of those wannabe writersdaylighting as an underpaid, overworked publishing junior staff memberwith a China-inspired manuscript of her own, and she’s jealous I’ve made itbig when she hasn’t. I get that—in publishing, that’s a universal dynamic.But that’s not my problem.
im assuming shes asian so it makes sense why she doesnt like june like imagine a white girl doing this to your culture
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And Juniper is so, so unique. What kind of nameis that? It sounds Native, almost.”). Nobody talks about the difference inhow “Song” might be perceived versus “Hayward.” No one says explicitlythat “Song” might be mistaken for a Chinese name
my god ik a lot of authors have the change names for discrimination and stuff but man this is so
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Of course,” Emily says smoothly. “But you’re . . . that is, you arenot . . .”I see what she’s getting at. “I am not Chinese,” I say curtly. “If that’swhat you’re asking. It’s not ‘own voices,’ or whatever you want to call it. Isthat a problem?”“No, no, not at all, we’re just covering our bases. And you’re not . . .anything else?” Emily winces the moment those words leave her mouth,like she knows she shouldn’t have said that.“I am white,” I clarify. “Are you saying we’ll get in trouble because Iwrote this story and I’m white?
this is just like that white zionist lady whos gonna be writing about palestine
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clearly terrifiedof what lies within
who really was athena
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“I see.” Mrs. Liu’s eyes are red, watery with tears. “Thank you, June. Inever even considered . . .”
her using this poor womens pain like this oh my....
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she kept asking why the sisters were so insufferable, which baffled me,because the sisters were supposed to be us.
LMAO PLS EVEN HER SISTER DOESNT LIKE HER
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She drew so much from her childhood, from stories herfather and I told her, from things . . . things in our past. Our family’s past. Idid read her first novel, and that’s when I realized it’s very hard to readabout these memories from someone else’s point of view.” Her throatpulses. She touches her collar. “It makes me wonder if we should havespared her all that pain.”
aww
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terlingMemorial Library
sorry got reminded of babel
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Her enthusiasm makes me a bit uncomfortable, especially since therest of her feed is exclusively stuff about racism in publishing and theindustry’s shoddy treatment of marginalized writers. But, if she’s going touse me, then I’m going to use her right back.
her being uncomfortable about someone talking about racism?? oh shes s white
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The new versionis a universally relatable story, a story that anyone can see themselves in
but thats not what its supposed to be....
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The rest can go in anafterword, perhaps, or a personal essay we can put out in an outlet closer topublication. Or perhaps as additional material in the paperback, for bookclubs?
its the way they dont even care about what happeneded to the laborers like wtf
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We also soften some of the white characters. No, it’s not as bad as youthink. Athena’s original text is almost embarrassingly biased; the Frenchand British soldiers are cartoonishly racist. I get she’s trying to make a pointabout discrimination within the Allied front, but these scenes are sohackneyed that they defy belief. It throws the reader out of the story. Insteadwe switch one of the white bullies to a Chinese character, and one of themore vocal Chinese laborers to a sympathetic white farmer. This adds thecomplexity, the humanistic nuance that perhaps Athena was too close to theproject to see.
jaw drop wtf did i just read
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I can tell she’s trying to add texture to her characters’ lives, to showthe readers where they come from and the webs in which they exist, butshe’s gone way overboard. It’s distracting from the central narrative.Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore.
how is undertsanding a character more a chore??
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jumping back ten or twenty years toexplore a character’s childhood; lingering in rural Chinese landscapes forlong, unrelated chapters;
its called expanding the character
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Chinesehistory and baby name sites to find names that will be culturallyappropriate
STOP IVE DONE THAT NOOO
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and culturalallusions. Athena likes to make her audience “work for it.” On the topic ofcultural exposition, she’s written that she doesn’t “see the need to move thetext closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectlycapable of moving closer to the text.” She drops in entire phrases inChinese without adding any translations
shes showing not telling and i love when authors dont babyfeed the reader, she trusts the readers intellgence
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a thriller about a classical pianistwho makes a deal with the literal devil in exchange for a legendary career
i would read that
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we owe nothing to the dead.Especially when the dead are thieves and liars, too.And fuck it, I’ll just say it: taking Athena’s manuscript felt likereparations, payback for the things that Athena took from me.
GIRL WHATT
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I felt like the kind of person who now listened to Kanye.
yeah and your an awful person just like kanye
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My treasuredfriend.
oh so now shes a friend
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The whole time I’m thinking, I’ve made it. I’ve fucking made it. I’mliving Athena’s life. I’m experiencing publishing the way it’s supposed towork. I’ve broken through that glass ceiling. I have everything I everwanted—and it tastes just as delicious as I always imagined.OceanofPDF.com
shes so sickening
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I don’t have writtenevidence that Athena wanted me to finish the book—though I’m sure that’swhat she would have preferred, since what writer wants their work tolanguish in obscurity? Without proof of permission, however, my versionmight never be authorized at all.But then. No one knows Athena wrote the first draft, do they? Does theway that it’s credited matter as much as the fact that, without me, the bookmight never see the light of day?I can’t let Athena’s greatest work go to print in its shoddy, first-draftstate. I can’t. What kind of friend would I be?
i knew this was coming but god damn women
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like it was divinelyordained
ummm
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when I find outthat Liu Dong never made it back home to his waiting bride.
yess tragic endings lets goo
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But here Athenadoes something similar to what Christopher Nolan does in the movieDunkirk: i
so shes a nolan fan too
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I suffer through half an hour of the wake before I make up an excuse toleave—I can only take so much pungent Chinese food and old people whocan’t or won’t speak in English. Mrs. Liu presses against me, sniffling, as Isay my goodbyes. She makes me promise to keep in touch, to let her knowhow I’m doing. Her tear-smudged mascara leaves clumpy stains on myvelvet blouse that won’t come out, even after half a dozen washes, soeventually I throw the whole outfit away altogether.
shes such an asshole??
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which is strange tome because I thought Athena was Chinese, but whatever.
nahh not even knowing her ethnicity
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feellike a bitch saying it, but she just wasn’t that important to me, and shedoesn’t leave a hole in my life that I now need to build detours around.
such a crazy thing to admit
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thena’smanuscript sits like a hot sack of coals
why do you hvae that....
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I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her. That’s ridiculous; it’sridiculous I’m even worried about it.
its cuz you have a guilty conciense
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Athena Liu, twenty-seven, female, is dead because she choked,to death, on a fucking pancake
THATS INSANE
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She looks like she’s humping the chair,
girl stay focused please
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Her eyes are shining. Her mouth is wet. We’re sitting side by side onher futon, knees so close they’re almost touching. For a moment I thinkshe’s going to lean over and kiss me
THIS STORY IS SO CRAZY MAN
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We both profess that thelatest twink with puppy-dog eyes in fact does nothing for us
TWINK
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willonly fuel my jealousy
oh my god the way im listening to invu by taeyon rn
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I have to get used to itbeing out there. I have to give birth.
nah cuz why do i love her
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ovel has something to do with twentieth-century military history
very rfk of her
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ithout losingfocus and hopping over to Twitter
STOP 😭😭
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Would you tellme if you hated me?”
um june rn
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And it’s like, she just gets me, like she’s having sex with my words.Like, mind sex.” Athena giggles, then scrunches her nose up adorably. Isuppress the impulse to poke it. “You ever think of the revision process aslike, having sex with your editor? Like you’re making a great big literarybaby?”
HELP WHAT
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a bizarre urge to stickmy fingers in her berry-red-painted mouth and rip her face apart, to neatlypeel her skin off her body like an orange and zip it up over myself.
JAW DROP
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Ng
NOOOO NOT NG
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I’ll be derailed for days, unableto focus on my own work
sounds like a you problem
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only make about thirty-fivethousand dollars a year, she blinked at me and asked, “Is that a lot?”
stop cuz id ask the same too😭😭
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She always hugs me whenshe sees me. She likes my social media posts at least twice a week.
you dont deserve her at all
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Meanwhile, I’m just brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly—and no matter how hard I work, or howwell I write, I’ll never be Athena Liu
ok y/n
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“diverse” enough
nawwhh
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Born in Hong Kong, raisedbetween Sydney and New York, educated in British boarding schools thatgave her a posh, unplaceable foreign accent; tall and razor-thin, graceful inthe way all former ballet dancers are, porcelain pale and possessed of thesemassive, long-lashed brown eyes
she sounds so pretty like british accent and former balerina
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exotic
ick why would you say that
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the ghosts of all the deceased women in her family
ok but i would read that
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a richly detailed and subtly magical coming-of-age story about
kms thought of poppy war
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But although we started out in the same place
kms why did i think of burrs line in nonstop
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I because my mother’scousin owned a condo in Rosslyn that she would rent to me for the cost ofutilities if I remembered to water her plants.
FLOPP
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I’m drinking to dull the bitch in me thatwishes she were dead.
lord calm down
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Probably I’m here because I’m just that pathetic.
you are.
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which is thateveryone else finds her as unbearable as I do
nahhh what
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proletarians
proles mention!!
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with blue checkholders
crazy how this used to mean popular people but now its the most hated on twt
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thena is so stupidly,ridiculously successful that it makes sense she wouldn’t want to minglewith mere mortals.
ha ha get it cus shes named after athena a greek goddess but she was wisdom but this athen is "dumb"
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For Athena, the Netflixdeal was not a life-changing event, just another feather in her cap, one ofthe side perks of the road to literary stardom she’s been hurtling down sincegraduation.
QUEEN
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THE NIGHT I WATCH ATHENA LIU DIE, WE’RE CELEBRATING HER TV deal withNetflix.
CRAAZY WAY TO START
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Local file Local file
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crazzzy
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