The Lonely Hearts Book Club

by Lucy Gilmore

In many ways, every death was separated by a lifetime. There was before and there was after, and the only thing that linked them was a wisp of a memory that seemed to be fading with every passing day.

“A doctor? I thought he was a chiropractor.”

After that, she never asked me for any kind of declaration of love. She knew that if she needed to understand what was in my heart, all she had to do was pick up whatever I was reading at the time, and she’d see it.”

She was in every book I’d ever read, every tale that had ever touched my heart. Fiction and nonfiction, memoir and short story—no matter what I read, I always found her.

This world was a terrible place. It gave you people to love and then took them away before you stopped loving them.