Don't mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness.
But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.
Blank is to heartache as forest is to bench.
As a feminist you mustn’t blame the other woman, a neighbor told her. As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me, Kit replied.)
And it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.
All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can't see because you don't have your glasses on.
1976. The Bicentennial. In the laundromat, you want for the time on your coins to run out. Through the porthole of the dryer, you watch your bedeviled towels and sheets leap and fall. The radio statio...
He had had some eye work done: a lift to remove the puff and bloat; he would rather look startled and insane than look fifty-six.
[Her life] had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and...
Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.
Una vida así requería una autoestima exagerada. Suponía tener cantidades excesivas de esperanza y desesperación, y ponerlas al tuntún, como países tercermundistas del continente de las emociones.
To the right, the clouds have more shape and against the blue look like the figures of a Wedgwood dish. What a fine fucking bowl beneath which they have all been caught and asked to swim out their day...
This ceremony of approval was a charade - everything had been decided before we got here - and as with all charades it was wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin.
They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me.
They looked like frogs who’d been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs.
These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails.
The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you’re already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you’re anyone else, y...
The functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other, had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks--as if everything she said had already been said before......
She tried to smile warmly but wondered if she looked fakey, something Ariel sometimes accused her of. Ariel had said. It's like you're trying to be happy out of a book. Millie owned several books abou...
She should stay here with him, unorphan him with love's unorphaning, live wise and simple in a world monstrous enough for years of whores and death, and poems of whores and death, so monstrous how cou...