Status Updates From Das Familientreffen

"Gatwick airport is not the best place to be gripped by a fear of flying.
But it seems that this is what is happening to me now; because you are up
so high, in those things, and there is such a long way to fall. Then again, I
have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for
months. And I am about to hit it now"

"But I do not want a different destiny from the one that has brought me
here. I do not want a different life. I just want to be able to live it, that’s all.
I want to wake up in the morning and fall asleep at night. I want to make
love to my husband again. Because, for every time he wanted to undo me,there was love that put me back together again–put us both back together. "

"I look at my own children and I think you know everything at eight. But
maybe I am wrong. You know everything at eight, but it is hidden from you,
sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find."

"And I know how silly it is. You don’t kill someone by having sex with
them. You kill them with a knife, or a rope, or a hammer, or a gun. You
strangle them with their tights. You do not kill them with a penis. So it is
all–the I hate you, I love you, I hate–a dream of killing and dying, I
understand that much; that when you roll away from each other to go to
sleep, then the dream is over for another day."

"What my husband
has always wanted, and the thing I will not give him, is my annihilation.
This is the way his desire runs. It runs close to hatred. It is sometimes the
same thing. "

"I am trying to remember what he looked like, but it is hard to recall the
face of your brother as a child. And even though I know it is true that this
happened, I do not know if I have the true picture in my mind’s eye–the
peculiar growth at the end of Mr Nugent’s penis, the bridge of flesh
between the man and boy. The image has too much yellow light in it, there
are too many long shadows thrown"

"I can twist them as far as you like, here on the page; make them endure
all kinds of protraction, bliss, mindlessness, abjection, release. I can bend
and reconfigure them in the rudest possible ways, but my heart fails me,
there is something so banal about things that happen behind closed doors,
these terrible transgressions that are just sex after all."

"We do not always
like the people we love–we do not always have that choice.
Maybe that was her mistake. She thought she could choose. She thought
she could marry someone she liked and be happy with him, and have happy
children. She did not realise that every choice is fatal. For a woman like
Ada, every choice is an error, as soon as it is made."

"The seed my of brother’s death were sown many years ago. So if I want to tell
Liam’s story, then I have to start long before he was born. And, in fact, this
is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with
its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I
think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head."

"You can not libel the dead, I think, you can only console them."