War & Peace Quote by Janet Fitch

Fitch loads this passage like a weapon and then makes you watch it misfire. The opening claim, that "Girls were born knowing", is deliberately unfair in a way that feels emotionally true: it frames female socialization as something almost pre-installed, a grim inheritance. Not because girls are naturally secretive, but because they're trained early to treat honesty as a liability. Truth, in this logic, isn't liberating; it's combustible.

The metaphor does the real work. "Hold it in, tamp it down" borrows the physical ritual of loading an old gun, turning self-censorship into a practiced, bodily discipline. It's not just repression as a vague psychological state; it's repetitive labor. The "gunpowder" detail makes the stakes tactile and unstable: what you're compressing doesn't become safer, it becomes more dangerous. Fitch is pointing at a cultural bargain offered to girls and women - be palatable, be quiet, be manageable - and showing the hidden cost: the emotion doesn't disappear, it densifies.

Then comes the tonal snap: "Then it exploded in your face". The "your" implicates an intimate target, likely a lover, parent, or authority figure who benefited from the silence. The explosion isn't random; it's delayed consequence. And the specificity of "a November day in the rain" matters: November is end-of-year bleakness, rain is exposure, no shelter, no clean ending. Fitch situates the blast in ordinary weather to underline how these eruptions happen in real life, not in melodrama - a domestic reckoning that arrives when the pressure finally beats the container.