Meg Wolitzer

The mystery of desire was way beyond the conceptual abilities of Jules Jacobson. It was like_... robotics. Just another subject that she couldn__ understand at all.

There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan's feet were planted on Jule's head, and Jule's feet were planted on Goodman's head, and so on and so on. And didn't it always go like that-body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you to come into the city for the weekend as you'd always done, then why should you feel, suddenly, intensely lonely?

Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness, of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress.

Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?___mm,_ said Jules. __es. The Holocaust.

There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn't depressed.

Words matter. All semester, we were looking for the words to say what we needed to say. We were all looking for our voice.

People are always saying these things about how there's no need to read literature anymore-that it won't help the world. Everyone should apparently learn to speak Mandarin, and learn how to write code for computers. More young people should go into STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math. And that all sounds to be true and reasonable. But you can't say that what you learn in English class doesn't matter. That great writing doesn't make a difference. I'm different. It's hard to put into words, but it's true. Words matter.

For while they'd stayed close during the absurd years of his sharp rise, having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls--even if you'd once been best friends--was now just that, outsiders. Families had their ways. You took note of how other people raised their kids, even other people you loved, and it seemed all wrong. The culture and practices of one's own family were the only way, for better or worse. Who could say why a family decided to have a certain style, to tell the jokes it did, to put up its particular refrigerator magnets?

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you__ given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn__ know the outcome for a long time.

But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.

But, she knew, you didn__ have to marry your soulmate, and you didn__ even have to marry an Interesting. You didn__ always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.

No one had told her this would happen, that her girlishness would give way to the solid force of wifehood, motherhood. The choices available were all imperfect. If you chose to be with someone, you often wanted to be alone. If you chose to be alone, you often felt the unbearable need for another body - not necessarily for sex, but just to rub your foot, to sit across the table, to drop his things around the room in a way that was maddening but still served as a reminder that he was there.

I think having the knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children's books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife's work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.

No, of course not. I just feel content,_ she said carefully.__hat__ an old person__ word,_ said Ethan.