Wish I wrote that...

I was clumsy, easily distracted; I was "always in a dream."  [He] dug out the form of this hapless personality for me; out of perversity, defiantly, I felt myself pouring into it and setting hard.  I wasn't pretty or charming or malleable.  I went around with a suffering face.  I read my book with my fingers in my ears.

- Tessa Hadley, "Clever Girl"
Published in The New Yorker on 6 June 2011