Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which... is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It m...
And the reason I'm telling you all this is that I want you to know no one in my life has ever made me feel worse about myself than you.
All the more reason for you to go
Time seemed, as it always does in adulthood after a particular stretch has concluded, no matter how ponderous or unpleasant the stretch was to endure, to have passed quickly indeed.
This possibility was not flattering to me; it was terrifying. There were other things a guy could think I was, and he wouldn't be entirely wrong - nice, or loyal, or maybe interesting. Not that I was...
Maybe I have always been, as Vi would subsequently accuse me, someone who creates obstacles for myself than looks around in surprise, wondering where they came from.
I often messed up with people, it was true, but it rarely happened because I was reading them wrong; it was because I got nervous, or because I could see too clearly that I was not what they wanted. A...
I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That re...
I felt an old, visceral insecurity that manifested itself in an impulse to cover up our cribbage game, to literally shield the board with my hands.
I enjoyed making them, and if it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids.
Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.
After all, these were not topics you could discuss with someone else; what was there to say to another person about how it felt? You could concoct things you wanted but in certain moments the light sh...
It struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of something than the thing itself.
Yet surely she was as culpable as he was; recalling her casual speculation about when Jasper's wife's grandmother might die and thereby free Jasper and Susan to divorce, Liz wondered if a stronger sig...
Well-- My mother paused, and her tone was reflective in that way that is inevitably sad, because the past is sad. What I remember, she said, is that you were always such a dear little girl.
There then occurred the first and only paranormal incident of my marriage. Charlie shifted in his sleep, opened his eyes, looked at me and, without preamble, said, You have to forgive yourself for kil...
Such compliments—they were thrilling but almost impossible to absorb in this quantity, at this pace. It was like she was being pelted with a magnificent hail, and she wished she could save the individ...
She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant and contrad...
Plus, it made me nervous, because was this the time in my own life before I found someone to love and had a family and looked back longingly on my youthful freedom? Or was it the beginning of what my...
Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.