The Sequel (The Book Series, #2)

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

No one ever actually confronts that person who fails to do that thing they were almost certainly never going to get done. No one actually ever says: So, what happened to that plan of yours?

I think time was just passing, and as it did, I was giving myself permission to let him go.”

The accusation didn’t have to be factual in order for it to be harmful. The harm was in the accusation. After all, just being associated with the idea of appropriation is enough to compromise a writing career. Don’t you agree?”

By November, she was on the road full-time, working her way around the country from the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge to the Charleston Book Festival (where she stayed in a glorious hotel on The Battery) to the Texas Book Fest in Austin, and out to Portland, Oregon, for Literary Arts, with a necessary side trip to Seattle.

They wanted her to be “happy,” but they also feared the prospect of her “happiness,” because of how it would put their own eternally lost happiness in such bold relief.

The mania over Jake’s novel derived from the outsize human emotions at its core, a scale of resentment and drama and retribution that seemed, even to herself, more closely attuned to Greek mythology or classical opera than to contemporary lives, where such storylines had been shrunk to the proportions of a season’s arc on a Real Housewives show.