More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Mostly, he said, because he was too busy being sad.
Every single morning this thought overwhelmed him momentarily; it panicked him, so that the first thing he thought when he awoke was this: Something is wrong. There is trouble. I am in trouble.
How could she not see that this wasn’t a small deal?
wouldn’t understand just how short they were. This was good because it was hard enough to just be short. This was bad because it meant disappointing people who had seen you in just such a benchmark-deprived way and had expected you to be bigger.
She was becoming, it seemed to him, the kind of girl that it was completely exhausting to be.
Is a marriage that ends doomed from the start?
These questions weren’t really about him; no, they were questions about how perceptive people were and what they missed and who else was about to announce their divorce and whether the undercurrent of tension in their own marriages would eventually lead to their demise.
How miserable is too miserable? One day he would not be recently divorced, but he would never forget those questions, the way people pretended to care for him while they were really asking after themselves.
He was learning to use the I instead of we to indicate availability for barbecues and cocktail parties, when he was invited, which wasn’t often.
She was a monster, yes, but she had always been a monster, and she was still his monster, for she had not yet been claimed by another, for he was still not legally done with her, for she still haunted him.
And there had been Rachel, who didn’t look at him like he was too short or too pathetic, even though he was, he was.
Neither of them could imagine having so little anxiety that you could fall asleep in the middle of a park in Manhattan; the anxiety was a thing they had in common to the end.
But Facebook was also a landscape of roads not taken and moments of bliss, real or staged, that he couldn’t bear.
Most of all, we didn’t know how severe the damage had been to him for being someone who had desires and wanted to be desired back and hadn’t been.
He had learned that he was permanently relegated to support staff status for guys like Seth. It was either his height, or his feelings about his height, or maybe he just truly lacked charm and good looks and charisma. Whatever it was, he watched those Seths of the world perform an animal mating dance in public in a way he would never dare to.
Our defenses were the same: sarcasm, pettiness, a protective well-readness that we hoped conveyed that we were smarter than everyone.
He dumped me suddenly and unceremoniously because I never dumped anyone; I never had faith there would be anyone else.
I owned a car that put my comfort ahead of the health and future of the planet.
And in our laughter we heard our youth, and it is not not a dangerous thing to be at the doorstep to middle age and at an impasse in your life and to suddenly be hearing sounds from your youth.
He now felt young and somehow this made me feel even older. It was like I wasn’t looking, and then suddenly I was gone.
I kept the document up on my computer, but minimized, and I only turned to it every few weeks before feeling overwhelmed about what it was that I was trying to do with it.
“She might be the one,” Seth said. “They all might be the one.”
He didn’t remember the telling of stories, but maybe that was because back when he was young, nobody had stories yet; everything interesting was happening right then, not in the past.
Here is how innocent I was and here is how cruel my spouse was.
He was surprised by the totally new-to-him notion that relationships didn’t all have to go anywhere; they didn’t even have to be relationships.
“Toby, Toby, you are so angry. When did you get this angry?”
“Why’s she so angry?”
downstairs the minute they were ready to leave. David Cooper was scared, like anyone would be, but he also had the particular surprise that belonged to those who had been insulated from bad things.
Do you know how scary it is for a body you’ve had your whole life to suddenly turn on you? For the system you relied on to just break down like that?
There was not a number at which anyone said, “I have a good life. I’d like to see if I can help someone else have a good life.”
But when they weren’t fighting, the intimacy was gone.
Me working myself into an early grave so that you can do what you want to do instead of what you have to do is integrity?”
made her look like a lunatic on the subway. “You are so wedded to this narrative that you are good and everyone else is bad.
Because somewhere, in one of them, he was still a hopeless idiot who didn’t see this all coming.
about. It’s about interrogating exactly why, when other children are finding independence, ours seem to want to crawl back into the womb.
She said she suddenly realized that the whole goal all along had been to get her to have a baby so that they two could be together, Toby and Hannah, and she could be discarded.
some crisis like this, and that was all you’d need to remember how much you loved your spouse. That was all Toby had ever wanted.
Toby is in trouble Rachel is in trouble
Toby loved her so much his heart was permanently on its knees.
The other women would say, “Look at Mr. Mom!” when he asked a question, and he’d find that offensive and feel the need to say, no, he was not the mom, he was the dad and these were his duties, but soon he realized that those women’s impetus for making those comments was their own husbands’ disinterest in their children or in contributing to the home, and so he just made a [smiley face emoji]. He’d
and his life would never be the same and he knew right then he’d never understand another thing ever again.
When was the last time he was excited and not just scared?
They never went on another long walk again.
How was it possible that he could work so hard so that she could impress her stupid friends and still disappoint her so deeply?
You couldn’t go to the private school without wishing you were one of them. You couldn’t go to buy a house in the Hamptons and then wonder who you were.
He could not bear the Internet. He could not bear that it was treated like it was not real and yet it was filled with real people who could just walk the same streets as he did.
Had he ever realized what a nice apartment it was, when he was so busy registering his scorn for the materialism of all of it?
He couldn’t hate it here. Ascribing blackness to this place felt like a betrayal of his children, who had been through enough.
Could a place have a soul? Could a woman who was alive be a ghost?
There is no bbq or body of water that will make me want to go to the suburbs
Every family was just like mine: chubby, domineering mother; clueless, servile dad; disgusted child; happy-go-lucky child who just wants to know if the slide is open; sometimes there was a third child if the chubby, domineering mother and the clueless, servile dad had started early enough.
