Lara Maynard

“Then one night a report about breast cancer came on the news, all about mammograms and early detection, women talking about finding a lump in their breast. We were making dinner. We always turned the television off when we sat down to eat but we could watch it while we were cooking. That was the rule. “I have one of those,” she said to the television set. “You had a mammogram?” She shook her head. She wasn’t looking at me. “A lump.” I had been cutting up a head of broccoli and I put down the knife and washed my hands. “What did you do about it?” “I didn’t do anything about it.” “What did the doctor say?” She looked at me then. “The whole thing scared me to death.” “So what happened?” My brain insisted on hearing it in the past tense, I had a lump in my breast once. I couldn’t understand that this was something that was happening. “I thought I’d wait for you to come home,” she said. “You’re always so good at figuring things out.” “I’ve been home three months.” But she had found the lump a year before, and taped a gauze square over it when it started to leak. When I looked at her again I could actually see a disruption in the pattern of her dress. That’s how big it was. Once we started making the hopeless rounds of oncologist appointments, the past broke away. All the things I’d thought about myself before—I am an actress, I am not an actress, I was in love, I was betrayed—disintegrated into nothing. I made bowls of Cream of Wheat she wouldn’t eat and then scraped them into the trash once they turned cold. I managed the schedule of people who wanted to come and see her, her two sons and two daughters—one of those daughters my mother—my father, my brothers, all my cousins, all her friends. I made sure no one stayed too long. I sat by her bed and read to her.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“As I watched them around school, I saw that all their bravado, their crudeness, sometimes their violence, dissipated when they were alone. That was the thing that broke my heart, that made them so perfect to me. I saw that they were soft, and this softness made my heart sore, because I knew it was a private thing, an intimate thing that only showed itself when they were unwatched, when they felt safe. Their tenderness was a world I was locked out of, and all I wanted was to be let inside.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“This is what I wanted - this independence - but when it was given to me, I felt isolated and cast out, riddled with guilt. It was one of those strange contradictions: I wanted to be on my own, but the moment I was on my own, I wanted to be called back.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“We could listen to podcasts until the hour of our death and not make a dent in the stories that are available to us.”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake