I love Twitter. It’s like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you’re tired of them.
In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they’re living for the length of a book inside another person.
While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That’s more than connecting.
Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.
Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely.
Please. Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.
Because it’s true: more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life.
Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.
It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.
They had been married for seventeen years; she lived in the deepest room in his heart. And sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself. Abstraction of her before the visceral being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of a sudden. The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning.
Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing.
Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage.
She said nothing, eloquently.
She shouldn’t have. She knew it. But her love for him was new, and her love for herself was old, and she was all she’d had for so very, very long.
Home, she thought, looking at him.
Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.
She would spend all weekend alone in the bathtub with a book and a bottle of wine. She could be happy growing old, moving among people when she wanted, but alone.
Happiness feeds but doesn’t nourish.
Even still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowing that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, and your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you’ve run through the hard part, you will remember no pain.
The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math. If one might die at any moment, one must live!