Tripti Nagar’s Reviews > The Names > Status Update

As if we are put on this earth to extract a certain amount of happiness and can leave once the job is done.

...illuminating their toothbrushes. Bear’s is already stiffening with lack of use. She rinses it, wanting to bring it back to life. But it immediately feels like she’s washed away the thing that made it worth keeping...

It shows a naked man, frenzied and wild-eyed, consuming a smaller figure, its bloodied, headless body clasped between his hands. Maia nods toward it and says quietly, “Does it make you think of Dad?” ...Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya, c. 1820–23. His stomach drops. It sandpapers a rawness he hadn’t known was inside him, and it feels too much to carry on looking.

His expression morphs each time she pictures it. Sometimes he is benign, sometimes stern, almost maleficent. A word so close to magnificent, she thinks, sent off-course by maleness.

Would you lay down your life for your child? the world silently asks. Yes, she’s done this. But she hadn’t known there would be a second reckoning, where this would eventually mean laying down the arms of motherhood: caution, foreseeing, checking, reminding, nurturing, openly caring.

Cora had felt a scooped-out hollow at her core with the realization that, however much she might have imagined she could exist in isolation, just Mum—warm, supportive, encouraging—in her daughter’s mind, she and Gordon were packaged together, two inseparable halves...Cora was an equal impediment—something to be protected and worried over. Just as Gordon was a presence to be minded and feared.