More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
They had coupled early and lastingly, the exception of one couple, Brett and Kayley—whose saga of rupture, grief, and joyful reconciliation over the course of a few weeks the previous year had been consumed school-wide with the avidity usually reserved for soap operas—being the sort that proved the rule.
This is also self-control, Sarah thinks. This brute willing of the self to take action. Until now, Sarah thought self-control was only restraint: not putting the chair through the glass.
In the future, Norbert will be a manager at Whataburger. This will be so consistent with their cruelest expectations of him that they’ll dislike him even more, for not proving them wrong. Norbert, so incurably himself. So stubbornly immune to all those means of metamorphosis.
Mr. Kingsley is wearing his glasses, and Tim wears a mustache, and this is probably how Manuel’s parents can tell them apart, Manuel’s parents who are a paired species also in their dowdy church clothes.
Now, she is always so tired she doesn’t even realize she’s tired. Words stall on her tongue. Tears gather prematurely in her eyes. Waking dreams drift and coil through her mind, similar to ideas, but perhaps not the same.
Having just, at long last, received her own license, a milestone the enormity of which is equaled only by its sense of anticlimax and its failure to grant her relief from her pain, Sarah is hyperaware of those occasions when a body and a steering wheel conjoin.
The smile remained on Liam’s face but now it had been there too long. He was acting, she realized, and wanting direction but not getting it. This was the strange quality that hung around his handsomeness, a blur or a warp where he seemed to be lagging behind his own actions and wondering how they had gone.
She hasn’t seen her old friend the author since both were eighteen. In the dozen years since, much has happened to Karen. Much of what has happened has been therapy, and the rest of what has happened tends to be described in terms drawn from therapy.
slender signs hung on the walls, describing the books that were shelved underneath. Art. Humor. Essays. Reference. Fiction. The words on the signs formed a system implying that people who shopped in the store all agreed what the different words meant.
In high school, Karen and Sarah had done everything to their hair they could think of except take care of it. They had bleached it, shaved it, permed it, dyed it, as girls do when vandalizing themselves seems the best way of proving their bodies are theirs.
As she pulls these off and steps up to the bar to order a Coke, David sees her. “The fuck,” he says. “I was just thinking of you. Remember Martin?” Karen finds this an interesting, excellent question. Like all her favorite questions it seems so simple and obvious that for David to have asked her seems idiotic at first. Does she remember Martin? But now the different layers of the question start to peel apart. Remember in what exact way? The dictionary tells us that “remember” means “to call something to mind, recall something forgotten.” Well, Karen has never forgotten Martin, so in this sense
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
David had, first, forgotten about the letter for a few days while he dealt with his own theatre projects and created and recovered from hangovers.
Karen has never understood David’s relationship to his sexuality, which like his charisma seems to stalk the world independent of David’s intentions, doing whatever it wants.
Because the perspective of a nondrinking person seems to be unique, especially among people who read, allow me to break in again and observe that in my experience people who drink never don’t when they find themselves with a nondrinker. In fact, they drink more. Nondrinkers make drinkers uncomfortable. The situation they’re afraid of—getting drunk in the presence of someone who’s sober—is exactly the one they create.
Another of Karen’s observations about people who drink is that their drunkenness doesn’t steadily accumulate like snow building up. It has valleys and peaks, of confusion and relative clearness. Although the confusion gets steadily worse, and the relative clearness gets steadily cloudy, there keep being these moments of reaching a peak, where the drunk person thinks she can see. She feels certain she isn’t that drunk. That’s where Sarah was, as the subject of David came up. Sarah was no longer high-pitched and hyper, she was no longer churning out fake excitement, she was tenderized down to
...more
But they didn’t need to, Karen thought—the author would like to indulge in an adverb and write—serenely.
We never know, when life reunites us with someone, how closely our stories will match.
Karen entertained herself by trying to guess how long it would take any of the men to notice her sitting there, not contributing a word to the conversation. But they were all drinking beer, and she wasn’t, so they weren’t even on the same clock.
As usual David steered the conversation back to his accomplishments, his self-satisfaction coexisting with his insecurity and self-hatred.
Karen hadn’t even finished flushing with confused pleasure that he was there to see her when all her blood had to change gears and instead flush with angry humiliation.
At the time Karen couldn’t have explained her decision to call her father and not her mother but it was part of that beginning of true adult life, paradoxically since it was a decision to make no more decisions, to seek out superior judgment, to acknowledge there was such a thing. Karen’s true adult life began when she recognized she was a child, and remembered that, unlike her mother, her father viewed her as a child as well. Calling her father meant doing things his way, but at least he had a way. At least he had a way, and the will to stick to it. Karen put herself into his hands.
Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.
As usual she clicked “30 percent” and “five stars,” which represented the satisfaction level exactly opposite to hers. Like most economical options, this one didn’t work.
Claire swiveled her gaze around, trying to scan every face in the crowd. But the crowd was so enormous it seemed not even made out of faces. It was a carpet of life that did not even have individual threads.
In her childhood, despite her steady lack of interest in nature, he’d often as bedtime stories described to her his favorite places on his childhood farm,
