What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love

by Carole Radziwill

But the night was ordinary. It usually is, I think, when your life changes. Most people aren’t doing anything special when the carefully placed pieces of their life break apart.

You never know when something is going to happen to change your life. You expect it to arrive with fanfare, like a wedding or a birth, but instead it comes in the most ordinary of circumstances.

You could lose yourself in someone else’s heartbreak while you held your breath for your own.

You go through what remains and there isn’t a lot that is meaningful, except your memories.

Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events. —MARGARET ATWOOD, The Robber Bride