And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’dread and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, s...
A body was just a body, just a vessel for her soul, and she was under no obligation to keep her body looking any certain way, no more than she was obliged to do anything just because it was customary,...
She married a man, she could let him plan, let him push, let him maneuver; and the world they inhabited would welcome them. They would always have a place. It would be easy, and Jo was so tired.
Much
Women’s stories matter, the stories we write, the stories we read—the big-deal winners of literary prizes, and Harlequin romances, and documentaries, and soap operas, and PBS investigations, and Lifet...
There's all kinds of love in the world, and not all of it looks like the stuff in greeting cards.
The new pills made my body feel loose and springy, warmed from the inside, but I didn’t think there was a chemical yet invented that could have quelled my insecurity, or convinced me, in that moment,...
She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft. As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many ti...
One of its ears stuck straight up, the other flopped as it ran, and I remembered something I'd read somewhere--that when God sees a dog he likes, He folds one of its ears down to remember it.
On the best days, there’d be a new package of margarine, and Bethie would be allowed to break the capsule of yellow dye and squish it all around until all the margarine was yellow-colored.
If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it's hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren't always happy ones.
I watched other kids and tried to figure out what made me different. Was it their clothes, their expressions, their hair? Was it the TV shows they talked about, the songs they sang, the way they stood...
I thought, not for the first time, that maybe it would have been better if he’d just died, a thunderclap heart attack, an artery bursting in his brain, a peaceful exit in the middle of the night, in h...
I remember things like that...A lifetimes accredidation of unkindness, all of those little longering hurts that I carried around like stones sewn into my pockets.
I didn't trust people who forgot to eat.
He's a great guy, she said ,and he heard her try to sound enthusiastic,like she was selling herself on her soon-to-be-husband's greatness...and then,in a whispered rush, just before she cut the connec...
For months I’d been writing, holed up in my bedroom, or doing the clichéd thing of bringing my laptop to a neighborhood coffee shop, where I was surrounded by my more attractive peers, the ones who ca...
Evian
But what we're really trapped by is perceptions. You think you need to lose weight for someone to love you. I think if I gain weight, no one will love me. What we really need is to just stop thinking...
Bethie and Harold glowed, with success and contentedness, and with, Jo thought, a little meanly, the kind of well-rested good looks you could have only when you were childless.