Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes from Deborah Copaken….
Deborah Copaken is a photojournalist, Emmy-Award-winning news producer and and New York Times bestselling author of several books, including her seventh one, Ladyparts.
I bought the book on the strength of its title and she describes it as “a memoir of bodily destruction and resurrection during marital rupture.” She doesn’t add that it’s beautifully written, filled with outrage, very funny and stuffed full of terrific similes. Here are my favourites:
- Riding downtown on the Hudson River bike path, against an amoeba flow of the vacant-faced heading uptown on foot, felt like being back at war, so familiar was the march and scope of human trauma moving step-by-step together, away from the violence, backlit against smoke.
- He was the kind of person in whom you would confide…Particularly , if you saw, from the way his suit jacket hung from his shoulders like an air mattress after deflation, that his time here was limited.
- “I’m not worried about going under the knife,” I say, moving the pieces of cucumber around on my plate like pawns on a chessboard.
- I’ve crossed off the tasks that don’t require financial solutions, but those that do weigh on my chest like lead aprons, one atop the other.
- I can’t stop staring at the neck of the man who meets me there. It’s so thick, it spills out over his shirt collar like mozzarella tied with string.
- New terminology and acronyms fly at me like tennis balls from a machine, too fast for me to return every lob— KPIs, CPMs, owned media, paid media, ROIs, oh my!.
- To say she’s a micromanager would be like saying Jack the Ripper enjoyed a little light shredding.
- Hou, whose bedside manner has been as smooth as a glassy pond on a windless day, suddenly bristle, her mouth pinching into a line.
Check out Copaken’s website here.
