Status Updates From Everything Will Be All Right

Hadley is a star!!!!

The arrival of the baby still seemed far off. She swelled up and was in love with the extraordinary shape of herself in the bath, and then with the baby leaping and jumping inside her.

He reacted to books with a fierce partisanship, as if writing were a matter as serious as life and death.

Somehow her aunt's unhappiness seemed more approachable than her own mother's, which she dared not even directly contemplate, because the fabric of the world required her mother to be believing and hopeful.

She feared and hated those closed circles of girls and all the high dramas they generated out of their intimate heat: once-favored ones excluded and weeping, once-excluded ones reinstated and brilliant with relief, lashing out in turn to prove themselves.

Joyce in her new hairdo looked experienced.
Not with the kind of experience her mother's generation had, pressed down like a dark burden upon their shoulders. This new generation wore it lightly and playfully, like a boy, simplified: free of all the old creaking corset-boned apparatus of women's troubles.

Secretly, she had probably always believed that if only someone ever uncovered her real self it might command love like this, all at one blow: like a vindication from outside of all the innumerable tiny things that made her up and that otherwise only she would ever know.

Swallows were swooping dizzily in the big empty blue bowl of sky outside; the wood pigeons were heating up their end-of-tether crooning; the weather was languid and dreamy.

This is good already. A bit funny too!

"Don't be meek," she said. "That's what I can't bear. Boiled cod and white sauce."

He was a strange mixture of genuine ineptness and deliberate clowning.