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Strawberry Manbun
A neo-Nazi friend of Matthew Houlihan’s, Conall is a young man with a waxed mustache, glasses, and many tattoos, one of which is a swastika. When he comes to stay with the Houlihan family, Aislyn notices that one of the Woman in White’s tendrils is attached to the back of his neck. Later that night, Aislyn unexpectedly encounters him, drunk, in her fenced back yard. He demeans, sexually harasses, and attempts to assault her. Aislyn summons the power of Staten Island to throw him through the backyard fence and walks away from the house. Conall’s assault initially makes Aislyn doubt both her father’s worldview and the Woman in White’s benevolence. When Paolo comes to find and help Aislyn, the Woman in White appears and accuses Paolo of “assault” against her people. Aislyn’s recent assault and her racist stereotypes about non-white men like Paolo combine to make her suspicious and angry, and she attacks Paolo. Aislyn’s negative reaction to Paolo after Conall’s assault illustrates how Aislyn’s racist upbring causes her to misdirect justified anger at her abusers toward non-white and foreign people.
Conall McGuiness Quotes in The City We Became
The The City We Became quotes below are all either spoken by Conall McGuiness or refer to Conall McGuiness. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 10
Quotes
Aislyn loves her father; of course she does, but Conall is right on one level: her whole life, Aislyn has had to scrape and struggle to maintain her own emotional real estate. If she doesn’t leave this house soon, her father will snatch it all up and double the rent on anything he doesn’t want her to feel.
Conall is very, very wrong, however, about something important. He thinks that the meek, shy girl that her father has described, and whom he is currently terrorizing, is all there is to Aislyn. It isn’t.
The rest of her? Is as big as a city.
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Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.
[…]
Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.
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Chapter 12
Quotes
There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.
Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eyepatches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so . . . Even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything . . .
. . . Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.
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Chapter 15
Quotes
[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.
The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.
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Conall McGuiness Quotes in The City We Became
The The City We Became quotes below are all either spoken by Conall McGuiness or refer to Conall McGuiness. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 10
Quotes
Aislyn loves her father; of course she does, but Conall is right on one level: her whole life, Aislyn has had to scrape and struggle to maintain her own emotional real estate. If she doesn’t leave this house soon, her father will snatch it all up and double the rent on anything he doesn’t want her to feel.
Conall is very, very wrong, however, about something important. He thinks that the meek, shy girl that her father has described, and whom he is currently terrorizing, is all there is to Aislyn. It isn’t.
The rest of her? Is as big as a city.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.
[…]
Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12
Quotes
There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.
Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eyepatches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so . . . Even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything . . .
. . . Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15
Quotes
[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.
The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.
