Andrew Martin’s Reviews > Ducks, Newburyport > Status Update

From 170-175, Narrator off-and-on discusses the origin of her home baking business, which has grown to a very time-consuming enterprise without her ever really meaning or believing that it deserved to.

“When Mommy was sick, we were all a mess, somebody once brought over an undercooked chicken and told us to “finish” cooking it ourselves at suppertime, or whenever, the fact that even we knew that was unsafe, the fact that the last thing a destroyed family needs is salmonella, or E. coli or whatever”

In the midst of a very long section about the narrator’s childhood experiences spending one year in England and one year in Italy due to her father’s work. She remarks that taking her four children for a yearlong international stay would be completely beyond her, and she wonders if Sylvia Plath wouldn’t have killed herself if the weather were better.

131-133: particularly lengthy passages about gun ownership and use in America

“the fact that Mommy hated her physics because they were always accusing her of cheating on her exercises, the fact that why would you accuse a half-paralyzed person of cheating on exercises, the fact that it’s a pretty silly suggestion since who’re you cheating except yourself, which is kind of, you know, your right”

Title appeared on page 94, by the way

“I suppose most guinea pig PTSD must go untreated”

“the fact that mothers never get mentioned at dinner parties, even though they probably cooked all the food, the fact that mothers probably invented dinner parties, and cocktail parties, the fact that the world seems indifferent to mothers, yet when they die it’s so empty”

“Grandma didn’t like women very much, she just liked boys, her three sons, the fact that Mommy was probably her kindest daughter-in-law, the fact that when Daddy and Mommy eloped, Grandma said they’d never speak to Daddy again, the fact that it was only when Ethan was born that they sent the telegram saying WE FORGIVE YOU, but Mommy wasn’t interested in being forgiven”

“according to the American Lung Association, two hundred thousand Americans die from air pollution every year, and seven million American schoolchildren have asthma, the fact that those seven million kids have to struggle through the smog and go to school to watch movies about people dying of Spanish flu”