Harold Brodkey has been a major influence on my writing since I was a teenager. Once, in those early years, I picked up his short story collection from a library. It was First Love and Other Sorrows. As a teen, it was a very attractive title and I've been picking it up still in my woman years. Here are some favorite passages from the title story of that collection:
"...But my sister's face was so radiant, her charm was so intense, she pushed her blonde hair back from her face with a gesture so quick, so certain, so arrogant and filled with vanity, that no one, I thought, could doubt that whatever she did would not be right."
"I feel sorry for the man who marries you," I said. "Because everybody thinks you're sweet and you're not."
"She was not a mercenary woman, nor was she mean about money—except in spells that didn’t come often—but she believed that what we lost with the money was much of our dignity and much of our happiness. She did not want to see life in a grain of sand; she wanted to see it from the shores of the Riviera, wearing a white sharkskin dress."
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