How the Light Gets In

by Joyce Maynard

Eleanor might just as well hold tight to a red-hot poker as carry around her anger over injuries incurred in a whole other lifetime from the one she inhabits now. The only person who gets burned will be herself.

There is a reason some people are broken. If nobody ever broke, if everything always turned out the way you wanted, if the sun always shone and the rain never fell, if there was only spring and no winter, only music and no silence, only love without loneliness, where would beauty come from, or amazement?

With her gaze perpetually focused on what was gone, she had failed to recognize not simply what remained but what lay ahead—a rocky and winding path she and her family might never have discovered if not for all the times they’d gone off course.

If you live long enough, everything happens. The good and the terrible. And it may be the case—it probably is—that a person’s glorious triumphs seldom serve as the best teachers of what it means to be human. The lessons are all in the failures. Failure keeps you humble. Failure opens your heart to all those other people out there who also fall short. It makes a person try to do better. If she pays attention. If she doesn’t give up.