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a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be
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Loving the first pages of The Marriage Plot by Jeff Eugenides. «incurably romantic» indeed.
She used a line from Trollope’s Barchester Towers as an epigraph: “There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”
What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel.
“‘Once the first avowal has been made,’” he said, quoting Barthes from memory, “‘“I love you” has no meaning whatever.’
This, Tolstoy says, is our human predicament: we’re the man clutching the branch. Death awaits us. There is no escape. And so we distract ourselves by licking whatever drops of honey come within our reach.
One thing I learned, between addiction and depression? Depression a lot worse. Depression ain’t something you just get off of. You can’t get clean from depression. Depression be like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch where it hurts.
eugenides writes about mental illness like someone who knows.
“Just get me out of here,” Leonard said. “I hate Boston. I’ve always hated Boston. Every time I’ve ever been in Boston something bad has happened to me.”
Stolen from my diary. Sigh. I'm going to be sad to see Leonard go when this ends.
All her life she’d avoided unbalanced people. She’d stayed away from the weird kids in elementary school. She’d avoided the gloomy, suicidal girls in high school who vomited up pills. What was it about crazy people that made you want to shun them?
