But is truth the same as memory?
I became a great internal shrug. All my organs gave way to the path of least resistance. I felt myself dislocating, but the dislocation did not have the expected result. Instead of removing me, it mad...
We found a room in a motel close to the hospital, the Mermaid Inn, a pink stucco affliction squeezed between a Starbucks and an independent bookstore.
We can achieve happiness not by remaking ourselves, but by subverting unhappiness. By throwing it overboard.
When you seek it, you cannot find it. We
I should never have confessed. I should have wiped my one indiscretion—one indiscretion in more than twenty years—from my conscience,
Knew it wasn’t the right kind of love, because it required nothing of me. I did not need to worry about keeping it alive or putting it out since it was kept alive quite independently of anything I mig...
What happens to a marriage? A persistent failure of kindness, triggered at first, at least in my case, by the inequities of raising children, the sacrifices that take a woman by surprise and that she...
It’s true—I don’t really believe in mistakes. There’s only what you do, and what you don’t do, isn’t there? It was a mistake to the extent anything like that is a mistake. The before and after of it l...
I would need to be not so much myself as the person I felt inside me who had so far not been unleashed. He
I don’t want something different, I said, and I meant it. And not just about the ring, but about our twenty-one years of marriage. The people we’d made. The life we’d shaped together, exactly the life...
Already I sensed that to claim him, to take something of him without asking, would be to drive him away. When
Sunflowers face the sun all the time in the day even if the sun moves. They were not actually sunflowers—they were prince daisies—but I wasn’t going to correct her. Where did you learn that? I asked h...
I had the feeling I always have when God and death become entwined—that God is stepping in to steal the thunder of a human affair, a glorious union of flesh and blood, the miracle of two bodies making...
I hoped with every mothering cell in my body. I hoped with every scrap of power and will, every particle of knowing you, the years and years of you, the joy and hurt, the work and pride, the worry and...
Perhaps it was the same cocktail of self-indulgence and abandon and want—and an unaccountable wish to be free, if only for a little while—I discovered in myself last summer. I
People say a mother is only as happy as her least happy child. But what if the state of that child's happiness has become a mystery? What if that child is no longer a child but a young man who has rem...
Of course it is upon the rubble of ancient history that the present stands.
How lucky I am that he turned up across the dance floor all those years ago and believed, then as now, that we were meant to build a life together.
He was so appealing, standing there, so useful and solid and familiar, I wanted to fall into him and demand to be forgiven.