Miss Butterfly las op onze boekenswishing een paar passages voor uit ‘The bitch rules: common sense advice for an uncommon life’ door Elizabeth Wurtzel, 2000:

‘I am not the happiest person. In fact, in the battle between joy and misery, I’d say that the latter often seems to prevail. I don’t like this, and everyday I refuse, for the eight million time, to put up with another minute of it. But the world does what it does, and I often find it disagreeable. After all these years, I’m kind of resigned to that.

But I do have one thing on my side: I have enormous faith. And hope. I am not speaking of the kind you find in church or in the afterlife or in heaven or in the Saint James Bible or in the Hara Krihnas that we all encounter changing flights in the airports of the world. I am speaking of a simple faith that says that one way or another, no matter how many times I stumble and stub my big toe, somehow life is going to work itself out.

So this is a book about mistakes. In fact, this is a book in praise of mistakes. May you make many of them along the way. May you make them left, right and center, and when you do, may you never claim to have profited from them. May you never ever chalk them up to lessons learned or experience gained or any of that trite, commonplace bullshit. Just enjoy your idiocy, cry about it and bask it in, and be glad you are lucky enough to have a life that has room for some stupidity and lolling about and kicking around, because, you know, that’s how it goes, and that is what it means to be living.

And have faith. Have faith that somewhere along the way you will manage to get all the joys in life that you hope and wish and pray for, the things you ask for every time you blow out your birthday candles, the dreams you imagine every time you see a shooting star, or even every time you sight just a lone, regular, pretty star, hanging out in the sky, and still and peaceful and bright.

I probably want more or less the same thing that you do. Being human, we all kind of want the same things, to love and be loved, and all of that. And in the rules I’ve laid out here, I believe I have found the secret of life.
The point I must make beforehand is that I myself don’t always follow my own good advice. In fact, I fuck up all the time.

And I have loads of faith. All I can offer in the way of advice are a few hints about getting and muddling through along the way. The rest is your mess to make and to clean up and enjoy. I hope you have fun. Because at the end of the day, having fun is the only secret of life.’

Reden van uitkiezen: de mix van goed advies, humor en realisme van de schrijfster sluit aan bij de kijk van Miss Butterfly op het leven en wilde ze delen met de anderen van de groep.