“A lot of the feedback I would get in my early workshop days was that I was ‘piling on tragedy.’ But the answer for me is not to take away the tragedy from the story. The answer is to figure out how to make my craft strong enough to carry it. It wasn’t that I needed to make life softer for these people. I needed to make my writing good enough to write the damn thing right. I have a theory that the negative feedback you get again and again is actually the key to your success. It’s the shadow version of your strength. You shouldn’t ignore it. Maybe it’s not something you should do away with, but instead investigate and rise to the occasion to do it well.”

“I told her how that weekend I died the death of the single woman obsessed with the married man. I imagined that he and his wife were at farmers’ markets picking out misshapen eggplants and herbs for pasta sauce. I walked and walked and walked. I tried to ‘find’ him. On Friday I emailed him. He responded wanly, shortly. I felt like I’d not only exaggerated the emotions of our evening together but wholly invented them. I ate nothing but broccoli sprouts and broccoli florets rolled up in flaxseed wraps. My stomach felt taut and I thought, But what for, now. The weekend turned out to be beautiful. Everywhere I went, mothers bought juicy oranges and great stalks of leek and fathers pushed tiny butts on swings in the sunshine. Nobody was smoking cigarettes. All that weekend every ten minutes I tapped my code into my phone and opened my email to find nothing. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting.”

“At times she terrified herself, wondering if she was a god, if being a mother was one way of being a god. Of course, she couldn’t strike anyone down with a lightning bolt, but she could bring a person into being using little more than a handful of clay. Way less, in fact. How were mothers even a thing? How had they not been outlawed? They were divine, beyond horrifying.”

“

I can tell you a lot about sex with a man to whom you are not attracted. It becomes all about your own performance, your own body and how it looks on the outside, the way it moves above this man who, for you, is only a spectator.

While it was happening I wasn’t aware of how it was affecting me. I didn’t notice until several years later, when three showers a day were not enough.

”

“

She was grateful he was bathing the boy, though during said bath he had asked that she put the boy’s towel in the dryer to warm it, that she bring in a piece of toast for the boy to eat, that she fetch the boy’s pajamas from his room, all as the man sat on the closed lid of the toilet, next to the tub, reading something on his phone. Sure, she would do these things, even though all week she had done them herself, without even the option of help, and wouldn’t it seem petty to point this out? She really just wanted to sit on the couch and stare blankly out the window for a time– even for just ten minutes– but her husband liked it when she was upbeat and talkative upon his return. He had, after all, just been in the car for hours, all the way from Minneapolis or Chicago– and he, too, was exhausted, for he had stayed up late that week at the hotel, reading or looking at the Internet, or he had simply not been able to sleep for any number of reasons– the room was too quiet, or he had ordered room service too late, which caused indigestion. Really, it was a challenge to be in a hotel all the time, he reported.

If, when he arrived home, he was greeted with the mother’s complaints or the boy’s perturbed demeanor or a house that was a mess, it stressed him out, and couldn’t he just have a calm re-entry, some time to decompress from driving, an hour or so on his computer. The mother had been indulging him for years now, and she reminded herself– again and again and again, she simply must remember– he was not a bad man.

She did night-nights after the bath, for the husband needed to wrap up some work e-mails, even though he had had the entire week to do so. Really, she would have liked to leave the house altogether and go to the coffee shop for the entire evening the moment her husband got home, either that or shut herself in the guest room and simply imagine– art projects or outfits, a future vacation. She wanted to exit, but it would really be inconvenient for her husband, for the entire family, as he put it, so she stayed.

Maybe she actually was in a good mood, even though she thought she was pretending? Maybe it was actually fun to stay and be together as a family as soon as her husband arrived home? Each week, she considered these potentialities, trying to convince herself.

”

“Do you see how it’s a cycle? I was standing there with the lead singer of a seventies folk band. I was attracted to this faded man because he looked like Big Sky, because I craved men who had big happy lives of which I would never be a part. The experience of Big Sky gored me… One man like that can be responsible for every big and small thing in a woman’s life. A woman he isn’t married to whom he doesn’t think very much about at all. But it’s not the man’s fault. The man is nothing. It’s what you think you are missing inside of yourself. I promise that you are missing nothing.”