We had chosen as our next book club selection Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, as we’d both loved her 2003 novel The Namesake and her first book of stories, Interpr...
We found ourselves discussing the three kinds of fateful choices that exist in the two books: the ones characters make knowing that they can never be undone; the ones they make thinking they can but l...
The thing about Americans, she said, is that you’re very concerned about everything all the time. Mom
Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves. The young man can’t think of anything to say in response. T...
I’d read in Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,
It’s a Buddhist meditation that Teza uses to calm his mind, to put aside not just the physical pain but the sadness and rage he’s feeling: He starts to whisper a prayer. Whatever beings there are, may...
I do think back,' Mom told me, 'on my wonderful headmistress at Brearly, the one who told us we could have everything we wanted.... And then, years later, I went back for a reunion, and I told the hea...
I did manage to read some pages from a book that’s also about how people can find strength they didn’t know they had. What book was that? The Book of Common Prayer, Mom answered. Didion? No, Will. Mom...
Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience by Susan Pedersen,
You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you’re proud of them too.
Why didn’t this one say this, or tell someone that, or let anyone know she or he was so unhappy, so lonely, so scared? Lahiri’s characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each...
What does one say to someone who has just been diagnosed with such a dire illness?
Were you sad to leave Cambridge? I asked her. She was, she said. Very sad. But she was also looking forward to being back in New York. The world is complicated, she added. You don’t have to have one e...
Trust is all about instinct. If you had all the facts, you wouldn't need trust. Trust is what is required in the absence of proof. But I believe you can strengthen your instincts by testing them; ever...
The truth is that people never realize their lives are about to change in unforeseen ways--that's just the nature of unforeseen ways.
The poem begins, About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just...
The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith
That’s the point, Will. You can’t control the beatings. But maybe you can have some control over your happiness. As long as he can, well then, he still has something worth living for. And when he’s no...
That’s one of the amazing things great books like this do—they don’t just get you to see the world differently, they get you to look at people, the people all around you, differently.
That day at chemo, we talked once more about the ending of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I just really want to know which character dies. I’ve read the ending again and again, I said. I hate not knowi...