Vocabulary

I wanted to have manners and a lilting voice just like hers

My dad stopped welding and started a construction business

I would go back to bed furious, staring daggers at the ceiling, listening to her yell, cursing her in my heart

I was cleaning shellfish and serving plates of food while doing my prissy dancing in my cute little outfits

Apparently, postpartum hemorrhage isn’t that uncommon. But it lodged in my memory

Walking our way was a guy with a huge, blinged-out medallion

When Justin began making his first solo album, Justified, he started being very standoffish with me.

They were putting a curious amount of pressure on me about something I thought was innocuous—and in any case, that was my own business

With this injury, I only had to reschedule two dates, but in my mind, I’d already started to check out

Kevin was just so enthralled with the fame and the power.

But the veneer had been so worn away by this point that there was nothing left

Flailing those weeks without my children, I lost it, over and over again.

I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression

This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom

They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible

One thing that brought me solace and hope during the time when I was in Vegas was teaching dance to kids at a studio once a month

What followed was a cloak-and-dagger effort to get my own lawyer

I started to appreciate the dazzle of performing in Sin City every night,

But by this point, I could fully see through his bullshit. I knew what he was really saying was: “I can’t wait to see your money—I mean, you!”