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It’s funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one’s past, or one’s clothes, but then—a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh. I have since been friends with many men and women and they say the same thing: Always that telling detail. What I mean is, this is not just a woman’s story. It’s what happens to a lot of us, if we are lucky enough to hear that detail and pay attention to it.
You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.
Dread. Worrying in advance.
It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.
This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly.
“You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”
“Lucy comes from nothing.” I took no offense, and really, I take none now. But I think: No one in this world comes from nothing.
I have always made sure to have an extra bedroom so they could come and stay, and neither of them ever does or ever did.
“Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!”
