Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention—exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.

The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there,

She has always felt Isla might quite easily turn out to be keeping a hunchback in a bell tower, or a wife in an attic, or whatever else it is extremely upright people often turn out to have been doing in private.

People allow therapy to work when they want it to, but the point of the process is seldom the end result.

Attempting to recall when it was that people realized the emergency was already upon them, the warning signs noted, then duly forgotten in favor of squabbling about small things, about taxes and football championships and protests that caused offense or caused traffic, of doggedly plowing a course.

the essential fact of Irene as a creature akin to a hermit crab, whose outer shell seems ostensibly tough but is only the home to a very soft animal,

At what point, she wanted to say, do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault?

It is easy, Jude has always reflected, to love a difficult woman. Easy to become the solid place around which she gathers herself, all her insecurities and rages and vendettas, the mooring from which she hangs.