book report: the rib joint by julia koets
let's go lesbians.
🌼 I’ve read this book four times now, which is something I rarely ever do. I don’t think I personally relate to a ton of the stories, I didn’t grow up in a small town, I didn’t come out until I was twenty-two, and I don’t think I’ve truly accepted myself as being a part of a community, even though I know for sure I’m not straight.
I think sometimes it still feels embarrassing, but that isn’t the right word, maybe it’s scary or stupid or exhausting, but I’m only out to most of my friends and my parents. My brother doesn’t know, but he might’ve guessed and one of my closest friends doesn’t know either. I’m bad at coming out, don’t know how to do it. I still feel like sometimes I can’t say it out loud, because I don’t know what word to use, because they all feel somewhat right and somewhat wrong, but telling people I’m something feels too definitive and scary. I don’t think I’ve ever come out in person, directly, except for one of my friends in high school, and I don’t think I’ll ever be someone who wants to sit down and say, hey, I have to tell you something.
When I was younger, I remember seeing people who came out to their parents by writing it on cakes and I always thought that was something I wanted to do but I never did. I wanted to be the person who just suddenly had a girlfriend, who could say, hey, I have a girlfriend now and answer whatever question came next. I want to read more non-fiction like this, where being gay is a huge part of it, different stories from what I know, stories that are comforting and scary at the same time. I loved this book. It made me feel less lonely and more hopeful, even if the book is more somber than that.
Photo from: https://www.creativenonfiction.org/online-reading/rib-joint
My favourite quotes 🌸
p13. It’s a strange proposition: coming out of the closet from the grave.
p13. We can implode. We can disappear.
p14. When I laid down to fall asleep at night, I stared up at the fluorescent stars, glad that I could reach my hand up and touch them if I wanted, that I could prove to myself, again and again, that things could exist in the dark.
p15. Sometimes, though, I felt a void inside me. The space started in my throat when I didn’t voice what I was thinking. When I knew that I couldn’t voice what I was thinking. The void moved down into my trachea, my lungs, my gallbladder until stars started to form in my tissues, my veins. I was glowing with fear.
p15. Danger is implicit in queer theory, as it is in astronomy.
p17. When I first read Sally Ride’s obituary, I questioned why she’d waited so long to come out. I thought of all the lives she could have affected by coming out when she was still alive, how my own life might have been different if I’d been able to see her not only as an astronaut, but as a lesbian. But then I thought, no, she didn’t have to come out to the whole world. She told her close friends and her family, and that was enough.
p18. I have been scared. I have no always come out. I have often longed for outer space.
p18. I never went into physics or the astronaut corps to become a role model. But after my first flight it became clear to me that I was one. And I began to understand the importance of that to people. You can’t be what you can’t see.
p31. Lesbian was something that a few people mysteriously became when they grew up, the way some people became astronauts.
p52. My fear of my own desire could be measured like a chemical formula, each aspect of my anxiety a letter in a chemical compound. Think of each line connecting hydrogen to carbon as a rib: a butane structure for fear. I was afraid that if I kissed Kate, the atoms inside me would split, and I might not be able to put them back in place.
p69. If a girl falls for a girl, and no one notices her heart — the physical thing, not the metaphor — falling and picking itself back up in her chest (lub-dub, lub-dub).
p72. You want to find the girl’s mouth in an attempt the locate the word wrong at its source.
p79. Regardless, the only way I was going to let someone burn me was if she was the one doing the burning. There was something comforting in knowing I’d share the hurt with her.
p85. When I was with Kate, I didn’t think about the future — partially because I couldn’t imagine a future in which the two of us could be together. But also because I was so present that I wasn’t thinking of the future. In the secrecy of her room, the only thing in the small-town darkness was us.
p110. Ghost stories get at the difficulty people have with ambiguity. We want clear answers. We want proof. We want to draw a clear line between what is real and what must have been all in our heads. I have never been good at numbers, at being precise, so in conversations with close friends, I say what feels most true: my sexuality exists somewhere between bisexual and lesbian/gay on the spectrum, closer to lesbian/gay. But sometimes my lack or precision confuses people — you realized your attraction to men wasn’t real after you started dating women, right?
p131. Remember how, as a child, noting the strangeness of loss, you rubbed your tongue over the place where a tooth once was, and how a new tooth grew in its place.