More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She’d always been this way, the surface calm, the depths rumbling. She pressed things down, away—until she couldn’t. The eruptions were epic.
It’s really one of the things mothers should teach their daughters. Chew your food carefully. Look both ways before you cross the street. Don’t fuck your direct supervisor no matter how hot, rich, or charming he may happen to be.
You don’t get to stop being what you are, even when you try.
All of society was held together by gossamer-thin, totally arbitrary laws and mores that were always shifting and changing no matter how people clung. They were all just barely in line.
He had been, in many ways, a good husband. And she did love him. Odd. Because she also hated him with equal passion. That rumble inside. That volcanic mix of sadness, anger, love. Villages would be reduced to ash when it finally erupted.
It happened sometimes, didn’t it? You just needed to confess? It was all too much to hold in; you couldn’t tell the people closest to you for a million reasons. That’s why people spilled their guts to the bartender, the hairdresser, right? Sometimes a stranger was the safest place in your life.
“Society doesn’t always know what’s right. Our families tell us stories about ourselves that often aren’t true. Sometimes we have to follow our hearts.”
She liked the shadows. That’s where you got to see all the things that other people missed.
“His behavior is something outside of you that you don’t control and can’t fix. Don’t hang your worthiness on his failings. But now you have to decide where your boundaries are, what you will and will not tolerate. Every marriage is a negotiation. Both parties have to obey the terms.”
She loved him so much—wild, deep, mad love, even when she hated him, wanted to kill him, railed against his stupidity and selfishness. There was something raw and primal beneath it. He was hers. And she was his. A fiery, blind devotion.
She wanted what everyone wanted these days, to be a star, someone wealthy and lauded for no good reason. She wanted to be perfect. No. She wanted to appear perfect to others. But nothing was ever perfect. Nothing real. So it was a losing battle that left her feeling perpetually empty.
But mainly, people were so wrapped up in their own inner hurricane that they never saw anything outside the storm of themselves.
“Friendship and the willingness to forgive, that’s the foundation of all long marriages.”
People communicated in the little things. Most people didn’t even realize how the smallest details spoke volumes.
When the same thing happens again and again, we have to look at that. We have to unpack it and figure out why we cause ourselves and others pain.
People—especially women—were racked with self-doubt. They looked around at others for cues, ways to orient themselves to a situation, the way passengers on a turbulent aircraft might look at the faces of the flight attendants. Just keep smiling, keep moving. Walk, don’t run.
Story is story, Stella said. It’s a portal you walk through into another world. And this world—which usually sucks—just disappears.
It required herculean effort to pretend that everything was okay when your whole life was about to fall apart.
It was a life that they had built—one that seemed to spring up all around them without much thought. And it was a good one. Wasn’t it? But before all that—what had she wanted to do? What had she wanted to be? A writer.
World crumbling, still making lists. Life went on.
Was it a lie to only show the glittering moments? What about the dull, the mundane, the ugly? If they weren’t posted online, were they less real?
She pretended to understand. But secretly she wondered—how could you, Mom? How could you let him treat you that way? She understood now, how you turned away until you couldn’t. Until the pain of knowing and doing nothing was greater than the fear of what might come next.
Who you were is gone. Who you will be—she doesn’t exist. The only thing that matters is who are you are right now.
There was still a pull to him; that connection, that attraction, it never went away. She just chose someone else. And that’s all life was—a series of choices and their consequences.
She wanted to live on the edge, push the boundaries, walk on the wild side while she was young. She hadn’t been ready to settle into a life where she already knew the beginning, the middle and the end.
When she was younger, why had the safe and predictable life seemed like a straightjacket? Now it was all she wanted.
Could life change so fast? Could you be one person on Monday, and someone else by Sunday?
She kept quiet now; she was tired. The world was something other than she imagined it to be, and it was exhausting to find her way.
People didn’t fall in love with other people. They fell in love with how other people made them feel about themselves. And so, it was easy to get someone to love you—if you knew how they wanted to feel.
“The con,” Pop always said. “Isn’t violence. Isn’t a smash and grab. It’s a dance. It’s a seduction. You always have to give something first. And then they’ll give you everything.”
“Think of your discarded selves as other people, distant family members. You know them; they’re part of your life. They’re characters, you can take pieces from them, use those pieces to flesh out your current self. But keep it simple. The more lies you tell, the more you have to remember.”
Now, as she made her way up West Broadway, beneath the thrum of anxiety, wasn’t there something else? Something dark and glittering. Why did doing the wrong thing sometimes feel right? There was a tingle to breaking the rules, to doing the thing you shouldn’t do—like driving too fast, going home with a stranger, fighting when you should back down. There was an energy in that space, an electricity, an aliveness she didn’t feel when she was doing all the things she did as a good mom, a good wife, a good daughter.
What do we all want? We want to love and be loved. We want to belong. We want to see the world, but we want to go home to the embrace of people who care. That’s all there is. There isn’t more.”
Nobody told you that when you became a parent, you became a child again; it was early bedtimes and grilled cheese sandwiches for all. Every date night was a negotiation, every invitation that you actually had the desire or energy to accept became a strategic maneuver that may or may not work out after all. It was back to park playgrounds, soccer fields, and Chuck E. Cheese’s.
They were on a dark desert highway, city lights blinking off in the distance, sky rattling with stars. She watched them through the moon roof. They gave her a kind of comfort, reminding her that nothing mattered very much. There was stardust in her bones. Not so long ago, she hadn’t been here at all. One day she’d be gone for good. And she was okay with that.
Had she missed him? Sometimes. Maybe. Missed what she imagined might have been. But life didn’t work that way. You didn’t know what lay on the road not traveled.
This too shall pass. Even the good times.
“Why am I just hearing about all of this?” she said, incredulous. “Where were you keeping it?” “Deep, deep inside,” she said. “Where we keep everything ugly, all the things we don’t want to broadcast, don’t want to deal with.”
You learn pretty early in your adult life that few marriages are perfect. There are almost always secrets, negotiations between couples that no one outside the marriage would understand.
There was no undoing the bad without losing the good. That was the trick of it all. The tangle of life. Just move forward, recalculate, recalibrate, find a new path.
That was a lovely little narrative, if not quite the whole truth. But what is the truth after all? Just a story we all agree upon.
In the quiet, she wondered how much of her marriage—of any marriage—was built on a foundation of pretty stories, a narrative that you stitched together based on delusion and hope and wishful thinking.
Women weren’t supposed to feel rage, were they? It was ugly. But that’s what it was. Pure and white-hot, a siren. She’d been tamping it down, pushing it back, swallowing it. Her whole body was shaking with it now.
They were bad people who had done unconscionable things. But there was more to them than that. Detective Crowe could never understand all the layers, all the facets, all the glittering good folded in with the bad. How complicated we all are; even the worst among us might still be worthy of love.
The divine nowhere of airports. The ultimate liminal space, neither here nor there. Not truly in the place you’re leaving, nor in the place you’re going. A bardo. Here there might be a breath, a pause between selves, between worlds.
I lost everything, but I found myself.
She was a writer, a dream she let languish and die. Now, through the ashes of her life, she rose. Write it, said Beth. When we narrate our experience, we take control of it. And in controlling the story of our past, we can create a better future.
