I can’t imagine that I’m supposed to get over it , like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not...

I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

…trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.

I still get plenty anxious. The weird thing, and the unpleasant surprise for me, of proceeding well into the middle, perhaps even post-prime of my career is that writing books has not got any easier....

The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.

These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could...

Like so many of our neighbors who latched onto tragedy to stand out from the crowd — slavery, incest, a suicide — I had exaggerated the ethnic chip on my shoulder for effect. I’ve learned...

In the end, that’s what Kevin has never forgiven us. He may not resent that we tried to impose a curtain between himself and the adult terrors lurking behind it. But he does powerfully resent...

I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for...

But the one thing he could not have imagined is that we were withholding nothing. That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules; nothing.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into...

For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in anaccumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimismwere more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It washard to resist the metaphorical impression that women...

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator’s credo that one doesn’t so much fabricate...

You restored me to the concept of home.

Whoa, that’s the kind of little sister I can dig!” said Edison.”Yes, we’re all alike,” I said. “We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your...

He didn’t like to be seen needing it – as if hunger were a sign of weakness.

Their home was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice – nice, nice, nice.I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. […] These were good people and...

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn’t tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman’s cunt.

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him – because broken machines are easier to fix.

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse… We are meant to be hungry.

He wasn’t mad, he was sad.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

The good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job.

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story.

Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, “son might turn out to be a killer” would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. Hassle.2. Less time just...

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can’t have that they don’t think for a second about whether they really want it.

Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]

In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not...

You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.

I’m pregnant.” I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother’s deepest fear.) (27)

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

I thought at the time that I couldn’t be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had...

Wasn’t there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?

In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons...

turn of the page,” I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story. And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge...

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it’s against the rules, isn’t it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn’t.

I glory in the emotionally commonplace

The secret is that there is no secret.

It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one’s children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that...

My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.

at least they wouldn’t be our same old problems… ” (22)

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

I realize it’s commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, ‘I love you, but I don’t always like you.’ But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down...

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.