The Sequel (The Book Series, #2)

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Matilda and Wendy weren’t just gatekeepers to the kind of success writers everywhere fantasized about; they were capable of actually transforming a person’s writing into a better version of itself, which was a real skill, she acknowledged, and something she personally respected. But it had nothing to do with her. She, herself, had never aspired to write so much as a Hallmark card. She, herself, had no intention of ever following Jake down that garden path of literary seduction, with its faint whispers of acclaim. She lacked, thank goodness, any wish for the kind of slavish worship people like her late husband had so obviously craved, and which he had managed, finally, to attract.

Is this not a perfect paragraph ?

Even deeply ungifted novelists had to have a vocation, she supposed. They had to believe they’d be good enough at writing to even try writing, didn’t they?

professionally sympathetic book blogger

Hahaha, I feel like I’ve encountered so many of these characters (or is it caricatures?)

No one actually ever says: So, what happened to that plan of yours?

Don't they, though?

she would stop in front of the New Fiction section and just gape at all of them, that week’s new publications enjoying their brief moment in the limelight. Each of them was a work that had been completed, revised, submitted, sold, edited, designed, produced as a finished book,

This always blows my mind. Each book is its whole own universe of work, a whole team of people, materials, energy surrounding each one.

Whidbey Island, Washington, where she had spent a number of illicit weekends with her boss during her Seattle years.

I can unfortunately relate.

Two of the men—an aggressively atonal composer and a writer of metafiction—were having an obvious liaison, but this was abruptly ended by a surprise visit from one of their spouses, after which a toxic bitterness settled between them and emanated

cool, accomplished people who could choose to live anywhere were choosing to live in Seattle.

Actually, it’s Tacoma these days. Everyone cool already left Seattle.

She had learned not to expect love, and wasn’t even sure she wanted it.

Back and back along roads she had no wish to travel, to a destination she’d never stopped leaving, and into that dark house where so many dark things had taken place.

Of course Evan Parker was still using drugs, despite the epic virtue signaling on his Facebook page, the humble brag on each supposed sobriety anniversary, the gratitude he expressed to his anonymous fellow travelers.

I swear I know this guy.

She was, at long last and without question: alone in the world, which was all she had ever wanted to be.

This person or persons, whoever they were, meant business, and it was Anna’s burden, now, to discover the nature of that business and shut it down: decisively, permanently, and, if necessary, with the kind of extreme prejudice she had become pretty well known for, if only to herself.

Always, with her, there was a scheme of some kind going on. Always she was thinking ahead to some objective. Anything between her and that thing was going to get at least ignored, and at worst badly hurt.

That was the thing about a private experience. You could speculate all you wanted. You could fictionalize. You could assume.

It looked designed to eradicate even the possibility of hope or joy from any soul unfortunate enough to enter here.

I've been there!

Eight thousand dollars with which to begin her long-awaited new life: a testament to the virtue of cash, the value of ritual, and the importance of regular tithing to the notion of one’s own worth.

Unctuous in his manners, plainly duplicitous in his smile, and that cologne.

One of my favorite sentences in the book.

The upspeak, that lamentable habit of women everywhere who preferred to sound as if they had no idea what they were talking about, did not come naturally to her, but it suited the situation at hand.

Why exhaust oneself trying to revise a person’s essential nature? It was impossible. It made more sense to accept the things one could not change.

She’d never have to defer to him in public or pretend to take his advice on matters of craft.

He was the perfect literary helpmeet: gifted, successful, and deceased.

she’d been making fiction far longer than she’d been writing it, and fiction had taken her far from where she’d begun.