Julie’s Reviews > Liars > Status Update

“I’d thought the marriage would improve, somehow, if I just improved myself. If I could sufficiently better myself, the fumes of my betterment would form a medicinal cloud that would surround and improve my husband.”

“So at his worst, my husband was an arrogant, insecure, workaholic, narcissistic bully with middlebrow taste, who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought.”

“He sounded as if he’d do anything to save our marriage - anything but curtailing his arrogance or going to a single session of individual or marital therapy or apologizing for anything ever.”

“I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.”

“When I said that I enjoyed being able to travel for work again, John said he couldn’t believe I’d even have that thought. He said he wished he didn’t have to travel so much. He said he always missed us when he was gone.

I got maybe one trip a semester, while he went to Calgary twice a month. I wondered if he truly missed us or if just hated being alone.”

“At that moment I believed my husband didn’t value w, my work, or my life. At that moment, I wanted out of the marriage. At that moment, if we hadn’t had a kid, I’d have left.

The feeling wasn’t resolved; it just got set aside.”

“Sometimes I thought that if I weren’t writing and publishing and traveling so much, I wouldn’t be so frazzled, but then I remembered that those were the things that gave me energy. What sapped my energy was running the house and being a wife.”

“John didn’t just need to win the fight; he needed me to agree that it was my responsibility never to say anything that might make him feel as if he’d ever done anything wrong. Feeling that he’d done something wrong really threatened his sense of entitlement.”

“He didn’t realize that I didn’t have time to shit during the day. He still shitted like a bachelor, whenever and for however long he liked.”

“The cumulative amount of eye contact we made over two days might have been only ten seconds, but it felt like an entire alternate life.”