Status Updates From Aftermath: On Marriage and ...

She told me I was obliged to support my husband financially possibly forever. But he’s a qualified lawyer, I said. And I’m just a writer. What I meant was, he’s a man. And I’m just a woman. The old voodoo still banging its drum, there in the heart of marital darkness. The solicitor raised her slender eyebrows, gave me a bitter little smile. Well, then he knew exactly what he was doing. she said.

He says, sometimes you say things before you’ve understood them yourself. For you the saying is a kind of working out, he says, like doing a sum on a bit of paper. You can’t always expect people to grasp it. But I want you to know what I mean, I say. So do I, he says. I want to know what you mean.
It’s late at night, too late to run away from something whose nature I can’t in any case discern.

‘Having it all,’ like any form of success, requires hard work. It requires an adoption of the heroic mode of being. But the hero is solitary, forever searching out the holy grail, her belief that she is exceptional perhaps only a disguise for the fact that she is essentially alone.