Truly Madly Guilty

by Liane Moriarty

Her psychologist was exceptional, worth every cent, but for God’s sake, as if you could float when there was no room, no space anywhere, above, below, when you couldn’t take a step without feeling the spongy give of rotting stuff beneath your feet.

there was a chance Erika might join her in playing the game they’d played for all those years, where they both pretended to be an ordinary mother and daughter having an ordinary conversation, when she knew that Erika no longer played, when they’d both agreed the game was over, when her mother had wept and apologized and made promises they both knew she’d never keep, but now she wanted to pretend she’d never even made the promises in the first place.

Do not engage. Remove yourself from the emotional minefield. This was why she was investing thousands of dollars in therapy, for exactly this situation.

“I hate you,” Clementine told the silent GPS. “I hate and despise you.”

It was only her debilitating audition phobia that prevented her making her perfect life a reality. Her terror of the terror.

His nerves were disintegrating, crumbling to dust like porous sandstone.

No one warned you that having children reduced you right down to some smaller, rudimentary, primitive version of yourself, where your talents and your education and your achievements meant nothing.

She quite liked this aspect of her personality: the way her mood could change from melancholy to euphoric because of a breeze or a flavor or a beautiful chord progression. It meant she never had to feel too down about feeling down.

Truly crazy people were too busy being crazy to think about it.

She was always reading, disappearing into different worlds where Tiffany couldn’t follow.

she looked back down at the page, and just seeing the words was enough to pull her back in, she felt it like a pleasurable physical sensation, as if she were literally falling, straight back into the world of The Hunger Games,

The cycles of dysfunction and mental illness did not have to carry over from generation to generation. You just had to educate yourself.

Two musicians could play the same notes and sound entirely different. Intonation was everything.

Was there anything more attractive than a man who longed for children?

It seemed this was her default state now: regretful. It was just the degrees of regret that changed.

A smell had never made her vomit before. Well, she’d never smelled death before.

Dakota had not properly understood until recently how her brain was a private space with only her in it. Yesterday she’d looked at her teacher and screamed the F-word in her head. Nothing happened. Nobody knew she’d done that. Nobody would ever know.

Thinking about it made her feel as if she were all alone in a circle-shaped room: circle-shaped because her head was circle-shaped, with two little round windows, which were her eyes, and people tried to look in, to understand her, by looking through her eyes, but they couldn’t see in. Not really. She was there in her circle-shaped room all on her own.

Everyone had another sort of life up their sleeve that might have made them happy.

Fauré’s “After a Dream” cascaded through the cabana with perfect clarity.

Just because they were parents didn’t mean they weren’t people.

She felt strangely self-conscious. Would she normally have jumped to her feet at the sight of Sam, and kissed him hello? She couldn’t remember. It was so strange that she would even consider this: the correct etiquette for greeting her husband.

It happened to everyone, it was called getting “stale,” it was called marriage.

Never take your eyes off them. Never look away. It happens so fast. It happens without a sound. All those stories in the news. All those parents. All those mistakes she’d read about. Backyard drownings. Unfenced pools. Children unsupervised in the bath. Children with stupid, foolish, neglectful parents. Children who died surrounded by so-called responsible adults. And each time she would pretend to be non-judgmental, but really, deep down she was thinking: Not me. That could never really happen to me.

Elderly women were as tough as nails but it seemed that men got softer as they aged; their emotions caught them off guard, as if some protective barrier had been worn away by time.

It was interesting that fury and fear could look so much the same.

Compulsion: one of those solid respectable psychological-sounding words to nicely wrap the truth: she was as mad as a hatter, as crazy as a bedbug.

It was interesting how a marriage instantly became public property as soon as it looked shaky.

That was the irony: Her mother loved things so much that she had nothing.

You could jump so much higher when you had somewhere safe to fall.