Quotes from Gina Frangello

How do we measure a life's worth? In laughter? In orgasms? In money? In how often we have been photographed? In children borne or raised? In the number of continents on which we have made love? In number of books published? In latest versions of iPads and iPhones? In jazz albums filling a giant trunk in the basement? In years? We are all specks of dust against the specter of Time. Is ninety years so different from forty in the scheme of things? We are all the walking dead of history.

There is only one way to tell the truth, but there are myriad ways to live a lie.

For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home. Places where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives—far from anything that was ever imagined for them. —SIMON VAN BOOY, Everything Beautiful Began After

grief is not a thing that ends. Sometimes, though, it cracks us open and exposes the places we've hidden, and that can be a kind of gift.

What does it mean to love by degree? What does this say, too, about my place in my own children's love chain? Is this the cycle of life, then? To be prepared to be thrown under the bus, if necessary, by those you value most in the world?

What happens when self-erasure has been the norm for so long that the You cannot find its way back to I?

What does it mean to love unconditionally? Are you obligated to love someone when you are experiencing their behavior as emotionally abusive? Is emotional abuse real if the cause is grief or a mental health issue? Can something be a mental health issue and potentially true at the same time? Was

If anyone asked either of us, we would say that we have a beautiful, happy family, and in so, so many regards we would be telling the truth. But it's what isn't on the page—what resides in the white spaces between words—that tells our story of things lost.

There is never only one Truth. There is only one truth at a time.

No matter what I give, I will always fall short of what I—daughter, mother, wife—am supposed to be.

do not believe in divine retribution or karma or any hand of god or fate that takes a sentient interest in the happenings of our world. But what I know: there are circumstances that unearth you irrevocably, that break you, that leave you never again an unbroken whole.

But our children are never ours. We belong to them, but they belong to themselves. They belong to people not yet born.

I grew up with the mistaken impression that cleverness could exempt me from anything, but middle age teaches nothing if not the lesson that nobody is exempt.

I'm so repressed even my dreams aren't exciting.

How many walks down the stairs will I regret not having made?

The dirt is coming for us all as we free-fall. This much I know: that eventually, we all have to start screaming well before we hit the ground, so the women below us will understand when to scatter, when to take cover, when it is safe to come back outside and try again to change the world. So that future generations will know, from the echo of our voices, never to stop watching the sky.

And: there are so many paths we could have traveled—so many other people we could have been. Staying would not have rendered me weak—an inconsequential June Cleaver—just as cheating didn't make me a coldhearted monster. The clean reduction of a woman to any prime number is always a lie, even if some lies are prettier than others.

Baldwin says that suffering "may be the only equality we have," and that all pain is real and not easily quantified or measured.

It is impossible to say whether the fact that I am instructing my husband on how to eat, or that he heeds my agitation and revulsion not at all and continues to buy tubs of meringues to slurp at will, is more indicative of the state of our marriage.

Art cannot save anybody from anything," wrote Gilbert Sorrentino

If I believe that art can, in fact, save us, over and over again, then does it follow that I risk the audacity of believing that you might be the very one who needs my words to save your life?

The ways in which women nth love and support one another, and mistrust and betray and undermine one another, may be the most complex thing in the universe.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?" Muriel Rukeyser wrote in 1968, the year of my birth. "The world would split open.

My life has become a series of fast-moving parts, each hurtling forward while I race to catch up, forever on the verge of tripping.