Status Updates From Everything Will be Alright ...

Zoe looked back upon the ruins of the old life with astonishment at her innocence then; that she had really believed you could exempt yourself so easily from the grown-up burdens, as if you were children playing house.

Now that she had Pearl, this order of life - in which the material arrangements floated lightly on the periphery and knowledge and books and music were the real dense substance at the centre - was completely over-turned.

He made no separation between his life and his work. He reacted to books with a fierce partisanship as if writing was a matter as serious as life and death.

Fiona hadn't even been willing to exchange a few words with her; as though she suspected that Zoe's very desire for her friendship was something fake, something to show off, some deal Zoe was trying to make to get absolution for her own privilege, for university, for 'Cambridge', for arty parents and a big house.

Fiona hadn't even been willing to exchange a few words with her; as though she suspected that Zoe's very desire for her friendship was something fake, something to show off, some deal Zoe was trying to make to get absolution for her own privilege, for university, for 'Cambridge', for arty parents and a big house.

Fiona was very willing to be Zoe's friend; the only difficulty was that she was willing to be everybody's. Zoe was jealous, and persistent; she grabbed Fiona by the arm in a quick settling gesture of claim and possession…

If you touched them yourself, possessed them, put them on, might you not take on something of the superior substance and depth that the past had, in contrast to the shallow present? This active nostalgia, and an elegiac sense that the best things were gone, were Zoe's first strong abstract emotions.

Once she had come, through books mostly, to believe that there had really been other times in the past when things were done differently, she felt sure that the past must have been a better place. This was first and foremost an aesthetic judgement.

Once she had come, through books mostly, to believe that there had really been other times in the past when things were done differently, she felt sure that the past must have been a better place. This was first and foremost an aesthetic judgement.

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.