How we cite our quotes:
Quote #1
She called her dad instead. He sounded tired, but he wasn't trying to replace the stairs with a water slide, so that was an improvement. (6.159)
Cath's dad has bipolar disorder, which means he alternates between depressed and manic. Mania in a nutshell: trying to replace the stairs with a water slide.
Quote #2
"I remember thinking that me and Abel would never be like Dad and Mom, that if Abel ever got tired of me, I'd survive it." (7.79)
There's an old cliché that we date and/or marry our parents. (People like them, that is—marrying your actual parents is all kinds of wrong.) In Cath's case, she chooses a safe boyfriend who's her parents' complete opposite.
Quote #3
They had the same DNA. The same nature, the same nurture. All the differences between them didn't make sense. (8.65)
Wren and Cath may look identical, but they've never had identical personalities. Wren's the extrovert, Cath's the introvert, and college brings out their differences even more.
Quote #4
What's the point of having a twin sister if you won't let her look out for you? If you won't let her fight at your back? (11.115)
Wren feels the need to separate herself from Cath before Cath is ready to separate from Wren. She doesn't want Cath fighting for or with her anymore—she wants to do battle by herself.
Quote #5
"I know," Cath said, "it's lame, but I think Simon wants so badly for the Mage to be his dad that he won't let himself accept the overwhelming evidence. If it were wrong, it would ruin him." (12.106)
Professor Piper encourages Cath to write what she knows, which Cath thinks is impossible. She's been doing it all along, however—just in Simon's voice.
Quote #6
They'd even gone to therapy together after their mom left. Which seemed weird, now that Cath thought about it. Especially considering how differently they'd reacted—Wren acting out, Cath acting in. (13.13)
There's a lot of bipolarity in Fangirl, and we're not just talking about Dad's mental illness. Cath and Wren prove that sometimes being identical means being exact opposites.
Quote #7
(Cath still found this incredibly embarrassing; it was like their mom was so self-centered, she couldn't be trusted not to desecrate a national tragedy with her own issues.) (13.17)
What's worse than having your mom leave you? Having her leave on 9/11. Like, the 9/11, not an anniversary. Ugh.
Quote #8
"You don't get to be the mother if you show up after the kids are already grown up. She's like all those animals at the end of the story who show up to eat the Little Red Hen's bread." (14.77)
The Little Red Hen is a capitalist epic of a children's book. Basically, none of the other animals want to help the hen plant the wheat and harvest the grain, but they all want to eat the bread, so the hen is all, no worky, no bready. Yes, in this analogy, our narrator is bread, and her mom is communist livestock.
Quote #9
"Why this? You're the one who keeps reminding me that we're two separate people, that we don't have to do the same things all the time. So, fine. You can go have a relationship with the parent who abandoned us, and I'll stay here and take care of the one who picked up the pieces." (20.64)
Cath and Wren are reversing roles big time here. Wren still needs to be the child, even if her mom's not much of a mom, while Cath, on the other hand, takes on a parental role with their sick dad.
Quote #10
"People are going to feel sorry for me, and I won't ever have any normal relationships—and it's always going to be because I didn't have a mother. Always. That's the ultimate kind of broken." (20.70)
Will you always be broken if your mom leaves you? Probably, to some degree. Does that mean you can never have a normal relationship? No way. Just because your mom was messed up doesn't mean you have to stick with messed-up people forever.