This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

by Ann Patchett

We should be able to tap into the constant narrative flow our minds provide,

Oh, Grace, with her raveling sweaters and thick socks, her gray hair flying in every direction, the dulcet tones of Brooklyn in her voice, she was a masterpiece of human life.

she couldn’t return our stories because she had been robbed the night before. A burglar had broken into her apartment and tied her to the kitchen chair. She then proceeded to talk to him about his hard life for more than an hour. In the end he took her camera and her bag full of our homework. I’m sure I was not alone in thinking how lucky that guy was to have gotten so much of Grace’s undivided attention.

She kept her editors waiting longer than her students. She taught me that writing must not be compartmentalized. You don’t step out of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life, and who you were as a mother, teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person.

I budgeted in a certain amount of time to feel guilty about what I had done in the past and anxious about what I would do in the future.

our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t telling the truth; we’ve simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we don’t go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. It’s the story we shape and improve on, we don’t change what happened.