Maureen > Recent Status Updates

“In 1972, when Chip was sixteen and about to get his drivers license, the world felt so uncertain.” This line made me think that I was 15 in 1972 and barely aware of what was going on in the wider world…

“ the only person she wants to talk to you about Chip dying is Chip.”

“ even so, she no longer believed that the best way to warn Silas was to suffer. Animals, like plants, bent toward light.”

In the years that followed, she would torture herself over moments like these, when she could have been a little bit kinder, a little bit more loving—would have, had she eaten breakfast, or not just stepped on a Lego.

Unusual. Thought provoking. Deep. Difficult.

“Fiona hoped that by starting to speak she would discover what she thought.”

“ as she took a drag, she pictured smoke running through her system like men and dirty work boots, stomping over clean white floors.”

“Some problems solve themselves if you simply wait awhile.”

“I couldn’t say exactly where childhood ends, but dealing with your pregnant mother at the age of thirteen was as good a place as any to wrap it up.”

“She might only have been able to hold one child in her head at a time.”

It took me a bit to feel comfortable with her writing style… based on previous books. This felt a little more chatty for lack of a better word. I would say once she gets to the retirement community and the story really starts to pick up I was sold and had a hard time putting it down.

“And now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand.

It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now.”

“He is not here,” “ I have looked everywhere. I have waited. I have watched. I don’t know where he is, but he isn’t here.”

“that people don’t always know what to say to a woman whose child has died.”

“I knew she loved us in the way that she could.”

“I think I was insecure and looking for validation. ..I think I liked that he liked me, more than anything.”

“…a preemptive, numbing ‘No’ to whatever the world wanted to show her next.”

“Yeah, but Cricket…dreams can change.”
“…because circumstances change.”

“She didn’t need Peter’s help, she just wanted him to support her decision. Why did she as always need to be reassured? She was sixty-three, too old to be afraid of making mistakes.”

“How are you supposed to deal with the fact that you could live to be a hundred or four five more minutes?”

N ow I understand how hard it is to find a starting place, how heavy our hearts are, how exhausted we are.

“You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.”

“He had made it his responsibility that none of the people he loved would die.”

“So this was having a family: you might mean well but hurt them anyway, they had reactions and felt disappointments you couldn’t predict.”

“ There were some things you never got over. No amount of thinking or talking would make them right: the best you could do was find a way to live alongside them. And goose would have given anything to be back on the lake with his sisters. In the end we’re given so few people to love and they were his.”

Strong 4.5. End of the world (fluids/climate change) type…so well-written, thought-provoking.

“Time only pushes wounds aside. Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out the loss.”

the past is quicksand and the future is unknowable, but in the present you get to float. Nothing is missing, nothing is hypothetical.

“Rhys Kinnick nearly doubled over with a previously undiagnosed condition: regret. And this single, overwhelming thought: What have I done?”