The Club

by Ellery Lloyd

That if you really wanted to do it, it was never too late to change your life. To follow your dreams. To be a better person. To start treating the people around you the way they deserved to be treated.

In some respects it was a mistake, as a woman especially, to be really efficient over a long period of time. Because if you made things seem easy, and people had no experience of things not running smoothly, it came to seem that anybody could do

We all have versions of ourselves we can bear to look at, versions we prepare for the world’s consumption, that we hope will make ourselves loved, allow us to be forgiven. Versions of our real selves that allow us to live with the things we have done.

What does it do to someone, to be repeatedly told that what you know to be true is a lie? How does it change the way you relate to the world, to other people? How you process your

grief, how you carry your anger? All that pain, all that rage—she could literally feel it, like a weight pressing down on her heart, her lungs.