Sarah Thankam Mathews

“I had been very shy then around his girlfriend, who had dark wisps of hair and a beautiful face, as soft and malleable as a baby’s. This, paired with an alarming kindness, left me barely able to speak. Thom I was comfortable with. At some basal level of emotion we were alike, even though Thom was a spiky version of what we called a bro, a man who would not veer from a masculinity at once laidback and entrenched. He lived in sweats. Listened to death metal when he was not listening to yacht rock. Lifted weights daily to a podcast on Engels. Managed, with good humor, the flares of his irritable bowel syndrome. He gave good hugs. He called me his dude. I loved that.”
― Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

“I comprehended at a technical level what a recession was, but not what it meant, truly meant, for the people tumbling into its maw. Some half of my generation never recovered.”
― Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

“I use the present tense, but I mean, that’s the way I remember it, and these are the things I learned about it, later, and the two combined have formed my truth of a place. We all have our truth of a place. There is no universal narrative of any city that is also real. Only marketing.”
― Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different

“This is my tragedy and my great good fortune, to be the recipient of this bond, to be kept alive under its crushing warmth and weight, to be given it so freely, so much more than I have ever deserved.”
― Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different