Clutch Quotes

“From a distance”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“When and how and whom they helped was more arbitrary and random than that, including the variables of: If and when and how the supplicant asked for help. If and when and how the universe amplified the sound waves or stifled them (under traffic noise, thunderstorms, the slamming of doors, the wail of a child). And consequently, if and when and how the invited ears heard said entreaties. Sometimes they were literally in the waiting room, on the edge of their seat, jumpy as an alley cat when the phone pinged, and the response came just as fast. I’ll be there. Other times they were moving too quickly to feel the vibration of a silenced phone trilling against their ass. On some occasions the woman in crisis said nothing, but there was something discernible in the pitch of the silence that cued her friends to her plight, like those high-frequency whistles only dogs can hear. In these cases, a woman might pick up her unringing phone and dial into the void. And then there were the instances when the non-pitch was a non-pitch was nothing.”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“Zeke had offered to help with overnight wake-ups, but had also noted that nine times out of ten, the babies were crying for milk, and so he’d posed the question: If she had to be up anyway, why should they both lose sleep? They were both logical this way, cunning and careerist even at two in the morning, and that was part of what she loved about him. Had loved? No, that was her residual sleep deprivation, wiggling in a way that just looked like doubt. She’d agreed with Zeke’s reasoning at the time—he was so busy, in the middle of a string of can’t-stop-the-train product launches and funding rounds—but watching his mummy-like form, how he’d seal himself off (eye mask, earplugs, moisturizing mittens) for eight hours every night, sometimes it was all she could do not to smother him with a hypoallergenic pillow.”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“and in the mornings, finding him mummied in his mask and earplugs all the way across their California king, she didn’t have the energy to wake him and rage.”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“However, she wasn’t so theoretical or aloof that she’d not acknowledge the audience as the third leg of her stool. Was it Jimmy Stewart who said, “Don’t treat your audience like customers, they are always partners”? Someone said that; someone said, “To have great poets you need great audiences” (that was her mother, paraphrasing Whitman).”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“In the version of San Francisco she encountered in 2019, the city felt newly icky, overrun with tech bros and oozing privilege. Lambo traffic jams, loud voices and secret speakeasies, so much posturing from the affluent and the ambitious. And the poverty, it was everywhere. Unhoused people sleeping in tents on traffic islands, in parks and parking lots, on the stoops of businessmen’s second homes. She knew it was an oversimplification to say that the city had bifurcated into two places, Disneyland and dystopia, but that’s how she perceived it. Two universes, forced to share one hilly peninsula.”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“Also, Carson could’ve signed on to a real job years ago. With no kids in the picture, no current or future tuitions due, she could have even worked in nonprofits.)”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“Of course Reba had regrets. They all did, and more would invariably come. Steering clear wasn’t the project, it was accepting their regrets and finding ways to make them productively dissipate. Theirs was a long-term project of regret management, supporting one another as each tried to control her remorse like it was the water level on some persnickety reservoir. They each had access to a series of spigots, inflows and out-, and had to factor in evaporation. That they might have total control of their emotional lake was as likely as claiming the control of nature, which was unattainable; Carson had known that since long before reading the McPhee book of the same name, since way before she’d seen the city’s subways flood. But still. They had to try.”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“Witty, incisive, and gorgeously written, Clutch is about the friendships that carry us through life’s most complicated chapters. The five women in this book, so lovingly portrayed in all their imperfect glory, will step off the page and into your heart.” —Ana Reyes, author of The House in the Pines”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“This is a bracingly honest and exhilarating novel about the messy, complicated, and essential work of showing up for the people who matter most.” —Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“Clutch enmeshes you in the particularities, yearning, fears of these five friends, as they try and fail and try again to love and care for one another amidst the endless push and pull, losses and joys of middle life.” —Lynn Steger Strong, author of The Float Test”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“Nemens is an expert chronicler of the subtle ways women wound each other, and also, the ways they offer love. The way a friendship can carry venom and antidote both. These pages made me laugh and broke my heart—yes, it had me in its clutches.” — Hilary Leichter, author of Terrace Story”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“Through bold, inventive leaps, Nemens’s prose dazzles, elevating the group chat, and the friend bond, to something sacred and vital. A big-hearted and daring novel from one of our finest creative and critical minds.” —Jonathan Escoffery, author of If I Survive You”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel

“Wise, witty, and at times harrowing, Nemens skillfully weaves the lives of these five friends, memorably cemented by time.” —Jill McCorkle, author of Hieroglyphics”
― Emily Nemens, Clutch: A Novel