ash’s Reviews > Whidbey > Status Update

“We have to write what’s true… But!… sometimes truth is relative, because we also have to write what’s compelling… is the truth compelling?
Yes… She believed that her truth was enough.
Of corse it isn’t, said Yale.
Of course not, she repeated…
The truth… is unwieldy, messy, long, and yes, boring… The not boring truth… we pluck and combine and deftly chisel… until it takes shape”

“There was knowing someone and then there was knowing someone. The first kind was knowing what someone tended to do. The second more intimate knowing: what someone would never do.”

“And then you left. It doesn’t matter what came between us as much as it matters that you left… You looked like a man in love… and what you didn’t say is that love of yours had conditions.”

“He was a real person, despite all the facts, the transcripts, the lawyers and gavel slams that had followed. Despite the way he had scared her.”

“you know I’m an emotional guy, but I don’t get emotional when it comes to things like this. People die every day. Good people. I almost died, remember- as a kid. You think kids deserve to die? So what if he died… he ruined kids. He nearly ruined you. He shit away his one precious life, so figure it that way. They call this a comeuppance.”

“I don’t want you to go, I said, testing her. I knew Trace would go, she had to go… prep [a] campaign that would pay our rent- but I also needed her to resist, ready to drop anything for me. Ready to leave her job. Her life. Anything. To love was to pretend”

“trees bent and swooned from a bay breeze like the world was stirred by the spoon of God. With the car windows down and my feet on the dash, I thought, I could be a real person, like this. Maybe one day. Maybe starting today. That’s what Whidbey was for. My body was capable of calm when I let it in, when the radio played loud enough to suck oxygen from the flares of mind, when I could relax enough to just be”

“her performance of mourning. Because that’s how it felt to her in that moment, like a performance. Her pinkened eyes darted from face to face, because she thought they should, because she wanted everyone to know something of her pain, of the unjustness of the whole terrible ordeal”

“direct eye contact meant two things: aggression or respect. often, she’d found, it was a little of both”

“nothing puts pressure on the legal system quite like public opinion”