Caroline O'Donoghue

I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.

I chose English, originally, because I liked to read. But even then what I liked most about reading was that I was good at it.

I don’t know who I was trying to impress. I did not want a boyfriend; I did want romance. I wanted passion; I did not want to be someone who was known as easy. I was desperate to be touched; I was terrified of being ruined.

“We’ve all had our hearts broken, and we’ve all had someone cut us some slack because of it.”

It is amazing to me, now, how convinced I was that my emotional debt to the people who had raised me was paid, simply because I no longer lived with them.

Whether the strange looks were real or not, they were real to me, and they affected every choice that came next.