Truly Madly Guilty

by Liane Moriarty

People with dysfunctional childhoods like hers didn’t have the best interpersonal skills when it came to relationships. Well, it was just a fact. No one had modeled a healthy relationship for her.

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

but she hadn’t imagined it, because reading faces was one of her skills. It was a legacy of a childhood spent reading her mother’s face, monitoring, analyzing, trying to modify her behavior in time, except that her skill rarely allowed her to get things right; it just meant that she always knew when she got things wrong.

All their secrets were kept inside, behind the front door that could never open the whole way.

You are not responsible for your parents’ living conditions.

But you couldn’t laugh your way out of everything.

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.

Neither Erika nor Oliver said anything, but Erika could feel their mutual happiness filling the car; they both responded like thirsty plants to water when it came to parental approval.

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