I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

That’s always my problem. I let stuff eat away and eat away inside of me and then—bam!—it just explodes.

There’s a big aching hole in my chest now where my heart was

Masochistic or not, I can’t stop loving her.

“That’s the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn’t it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.”

Life was a whoopee cushion, a chair yanked away just as you were having a seat.

I’ve wondered a million times since then if we could have salvaged things at that point—if I’d just gotten out of bed and gone to her that night I heard her talking to the baby.

People are not like Tupperware, with their lids on securely. Nor should they be, although the more I work with American men, the more I see it is their perceived ideal. Which is nonsense, really. Very unhealthy, Mr. Birdsey. Not something to aspire to at all. Never.”

The greatest griefs are silent.

“The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

Those years we’d been together were as dead, now, as our daughter. And without the hope of her ever coming back, I was already a dead man. Breathing was just a technicality.

She told me I should keep reading—that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?”

“Life is not a series of isolated ponds and puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on its way to the future.