Riyah’s Reviews > Sorrow and Bliss > Status Update

I'd find in my writing - self-fascination, banality, descriptions of things - would make me go outside and set it on fire.
It wasn't that or, at least, I saw shame and hope and grief, guilt and love, sorrow and bliss, kitchens, sisters and mothers, joy, fear, rain, Christmas, gardens, sex and sleep and presence and absence, the parties. Patrick's goodness. My striking unlikeability and attention-seeking punctuation.

But they all said, a person, a family, a home, money, to not be alone.
That is all anybody wants.

“Everything goes away eventually, and women are always the last ones standing so we just make up something else to want.'
'I don't want it to be an invented thing?
Everything is invented. Life is invented. Everything you see anyone doing is something they made up. I invented Swindon for fuck's sake, and made myself want it and now I do.”

“He had been going to say, No doubt my wife will correct me later and insist it was just for the open bar, but we are all here for the love of this uncommon, beautiful, maddening woman - who does not, in my opinion, look a day over thirty-nine and twelve months. He was going to say, 'I wish it wasn't the case, but everyone knows Martha is the only thing I’ve ever wanted in my life”
I’m so sad this is so sweet

“Martha, when you are in a room, nobody wants to talk to anybody else.
And you have been loved for all your adult life by one man. That is a gift not many people get, and his stubborn, persistent love isn't in spite of you and your pain. It is because of who you are which is, in part, a product of your pain. You do not have to believe me about that but I know that your pain has made you brave enough to carry on.”

'He's never felt the way I have. He has no idea what it's like.' Maybe so but he's had to watch you. He's had to hear his wife say she wants to die, see her in agony & not know how to help
her. Imagine that. And you thinking he liked it that way! He stayed with you through it all, no matter the cost to himself, and in the end he is hated for it and told to go?'

I MISS PATRICK I CAN’T BELIVE I AM ON A MANS SIDE UGH

“You think all this has happened to you and only you. That's what I saw yesterday.
It's your terrible personal tragedy, so you're the only one who's allowed to be in pain. 'But -' she said, my girl - this has happened to all of us. Do you not see that? This is everyone's tragedy. And if he'd been there, you would have seen it's most of all Patrick's. This has been his life every bit as much as it's been yours.”

“We were dysfunctional. We made each other dysfunctional.
I had to be the one to end it but I know it's what he wanted too.
He was just too passive to do it. Of course it's sad, obviously. But it is best for everyone. Not just us.”
A WHOLE UPSETTING MESS, PATRICK LEAVING, INGRID BEIMG OVER IT, MISERY ALL AROUND, HER MOM AND HER BONDING THO UNEXPECTED.

“I said that he should never have accepted the way I treated him but he did because the only thing he cared about was having me, the thing he'd always wanted. He just accepted everything, always let it be my version of the story, believing that way he wouldn't lose me. Not me - a version of me he made up when he was 14. He should have grown out of it like everyone does, instead of marrying his own invention.”

I was seventeen and nineteen and twenty-two and I was still a child who didn't think doctors could be wrong, or I did not suspect they might warn me against pregnancy, not because the medication was dangerous but because in their minds I was dangerous. To myself, to a baby, to my parents, to their excellent and unblemished professional records. Not a single unplanned baby born to a mentally ill girl on their watch.