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"The heavy sword, unsheathed, grey as that November morning, sharp as childbirth, mortal."

"yes, a skull, so utterly denuded, now, of flesh, that it scarcely seemed possible the stark bone had once been richly upholstered with life."

"A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside."

"Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig"

"He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke – but do not imagine much finesse about it; this artichoke was no particular treat for the diner nor was he yet in any greedy haste. He approached his familiar treat with a weary appetite."

"Married three times within my own brief lifetime to three different graces, now, as if to demonstrate the eclecticism of his taste, he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women, I, the poor widow’s child with my mouse-coloured hair that still bore the kinks of the plaits from which it had so recently been freed, my bony hips, my nervous, pianist’s fingers."

"I did not want to remember how he had loved other women before me, but the knowledge often teased me in the threadbare self-confidence of the small hours."

"I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage."

"We were teasing out and unspooling each thread of my story, and she promised me that eventually I’d be able to weave it back together into something more useful."

"And I’m not crying because I hate my life. I’m crying because motherhood is like having no skin."

"I looked at him, amazed at the level of idiocy from a man who was otherwise so brilliant and forward-thinking, an iconoclast who supposedly loved me. The man who took my tampon out with his teeth."

"No one held me in my nineteenth-century home against my will, forbidding me from having a career while some mad woman clanked around my attic. And yet I felt gaslit and broken, as if some phantom presence were controlling the manse."

"I thought of the character Jane in Penelope Mortimer’s 1958 novel Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting: “What happened to her during the six hours of labour nobody ever knew. Something snapped or something fell into place or her brain, under pressure, tossed about like the coloured pieces in a kaleidoscope, settling in an entirely different pattern.” Was I Jane?'

"Just as I was considering which juvenile insult to hurl at my mother, which verbal slamming of my childhood bedroom door, Tom returned, smelling like French fries, and I did not know my heart was capable of such derision and hate."

"I saw her fear, and I think I feared the same anaphylaxis. I would get married and have a baby, and I would be lost, lost, lost, buried under the goo-goo-gah-gah of it all, the carpooling and the poopy diapers and the deranged spatchcocking. If I became a mother, it meant my mother would die, a generational patchwork of anguish like a quilt my grandmother’s mother had made in some Indiana backwater town."

"And I know that, most likely, I will be sprinting, breathless, oxygen deprived and burning, chasing that type of love for the rest of my life, trying to soothe my sore, exhausted heart with the promise of that connection."

"In fact, for years, I lumped therapy with learning about periods and semen: something shameful that made boys smirk."

"[I] roamed farmers markets for fresh berries and watermelon, which I craved madly, eating pints of blueberries by the fistful and crunching through fleshy chunks of red melon."

"I was like a giant, blood-filled, monstrous balloon, ready to pop with any prick."

"I feared that I’d start a fight, and it would snowball, and snowball, and snowball, the flakes sticking to one another in a deadly mass, and I’d end up alone, crying under a big white comforter with no one to hug me. I didn’t want to be without him [...] I let my nosiness become an addiction I couldn’t abandon, the same way some people pick their cuticles. I was constantly searching for ways he was disloyal to me."

"But even though I knew it was a fallacy, I wanted him for myself, and, at the time, I was naive enough to believe that marriage would corral him into loving me the way I wanted to be loved."

"The words cut me a little bit. They made me think I wasn’t beautiful, smart, or electrifying enough to be his muse. And while a muse, by definition, was a passive role, a position I didn’t want to be in, I did long to captivate him."

"My mom would shake her head and say, "That woman has a master’s in English, and all she gets to do with it is help her kids with their homework." Her palpable disapproval hung in the air like a fog [...] I knew there was something wrong with this picture: being a woman in a car, saddled with kids who needed, needed, needed. Didn’t everyone deserve to have a life solely their own?"

"When my little brother came home from the hospital, I felt no instinct to adore him [...] I put becoming a mother in the same box as becoming a banker or a circus performer: a vocation I might be conscripted to perform in some far off future but didn’t have to worry about anytime soon."

"I felt my happiness drain out of me slowly, like I was bleeding to death from a tiny pinprick in the sole of my foot—barely noticeable, not even a trickle."

"The space program is the greatest art project of the twentieth century, he told me, dipping his fry into the au poivre sauce. But Grand Theft Auto is the greatest art project of the twenty-first. His eyes and his smile were impish as he said it, and I thought I’d never met someone brilliant like this: every facet of him shimmering with excitement and enthusiasm and goodness."

"and I could tell she was American immediately because of how big she was laughing, like one of those sparkling, glittering Fourth of July fireworks going of whenever her perfect little mouth opened."

"So instead of admitting any of that, which felt like a Manson-family-level crime—which I’m not even sure I could have found the words for if I wanted to —I decorated and festooned until everything looked Stepford perfect, frozen in California nostalgia, lit by flat sun through hazy western dust."

"It was the simple, unspeakable reality that from the moment he was born, this baby sometimes meant as much to me as a stone-cold marble statue in the antiquities section of an art museum—aka something that I knew was valuable, but not so much to me. It didn’t help that I found him so ugly, with all my worst traits: weird eyes and big ears, a mini replica of my own self-loathing."