This is Where I Leave You

by Jonathan Tropper

There is no occasion calling for sincerity that the Foxman family won’t quickly diminish or pervert through our own genetically engineered brand of irony and evasion.

Wendy sighs, like it’s positively exhausting having to navigate the dense forest of my obtuseness.

Mom always took center stage. Marrying her was like joining the chorus.

He is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead. As the baby, he was alternately coddled and ignored, which may have been a significant factor in his becoming such a terminally screwed-up adult.

where there was once the purest kind of love, there is now a snake pit of fury and resentment and a new dark and twisted love that hurts more than all the rest of it put together.

Childhood feels so permanent, like it’s the entire world, and then one day it’s over and you’re shoveling wet dirt onto your father’s coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

The house is like a woman you find attractive at a distance. The closer you get, the more you wonder what you were thinking.

“It just happened” was Phillip’s go-to explanation for pretty much everything, the perfect epitaph for a man who always seemed to be an innocent bystander to his own life.

Phillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics.

I liked this quality about Phillip. It reminded me of several members of my own family.

To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored.

it becomes clear to me that the reason for filling the shiva house with visitors is most likely to prevent the mourners from tearing each other limb from limb.

I may not be old, but I’m too old to have this much nothing.

In real life, you don’t get to choose what you forget.

“You don’t actually believe half the things you say, do you?” “I don’t know,” Mom says, sitting back in her chair. “I can be pretty convincing.”

We are separated by three inches of bulletproof glass and a million other barriers that I can’t articulate or overcome.

“Thanks, Mom. As always, your unsolicited advice, however useless, is greatly appreciated.” “You’re welcome, sweetie.”

You never know when it will be the last time you’ll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.

It’s a sad moment when you come to understand how truly replaceable you are.

I wonder what organization certifies matchmakers, what the criteria are, and, more immediately, how a sixtysomething woman who wears leopard-print spandex pants and bubblegum-pink lipstick to a Sunday-afternoon shiva call can possibly expect to be taken seriously as an arbiter of good taste.

Sometimes, contentment is a matter of will. You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you’ve lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.

Rowdy, hopped-up college kids pass us in an endless, noisy blur like they’re being mass produced or squeezed out of a tube—guys

“A problem is something to solve,” Phillip says. “If there’s no solution, it’s not a problem, so stop treating it like one.”

Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.