Quotes from Jami Attenberg

He clicked through a dozen of them until he found a picture of a dark, curly haired woman, ample, smiling, appearing much younger than sixty, so familiar-looking that he was immediately attracted to her simply because he found familiarity, rare these days, so comforting. He opened her ad and realized he was staring at a picture of his wife,

She opened the McRib box and eyed the dark red, sticky sandwich. Suddenly she felt like an animal; she wanted to drag the sandwich somewhere, not anywhere in this McDonald's, not a booth, not Playland, but to a park, a shrouded corner of the woods underneath shimmering tree branches, green, dark, and serene, and then, when she was certain she was completely alone, she wanted to tear that sandwich apart with her teeth.

Everything is a risk. That's what's hitting so many people so hard right now, here, as we approach May 2020. They didn't know that they didn't know.

When you slide down a mountain, or jump off a cliff, you accept the not knowing. Don't tell me how it ends; let me see for myself.

I love the idea of solitude being a gift. I think we can be afraid of being lonely, but if you figure out a way to own it and see it as a treasure and a pleasure and a joy, then it can be quite comforting.

Old college friends post links to reviews of it on my Facebook wall and say things like, "Sounds like something you'd like," or "This reminded me of you." I think, Am I supposed to like this? I don't, in fact, like it. I dislike it. Where is my dislike button? Where do I click to scream?

For so long I have believed I could never catch up, but now I realize there's nothing to catch up to, there's only what I choose to make. There's still time, I think. I have so much time left.

I don't know who I am. I don't know what to do with myself. Here I am, being me. I don't know what that means.

When the world comes to an end, we'll all still be trying to charge our phones. Until the last second.

I've never been in love. Isn't that shame? Not knowing how it feels like.

You can be happy about a lot of things in your life, yet just one thing can make you miserable.

Also I mostly stop doing drugs, which feels extra grown up. Not in any twelve-step kind of way. I simply couldn't take the hangovers anymore.

Her father there, her mother here. A universe-sized gap between them.

Once she was deeply fascinated with her parents. She had craved knowledge about them. As a child she fiddled with locked doors and drawers, got down on her knees and dug through closets, lingered outside her father's study during business calls until her mother shooed her off. Fifteen years ago, she had at last recognized the pointlessness in trying to uncover the truth from a man who had never actually been convicted of anything, and a woman who had sealed shut her emotions decades ago.

Meanwhile, Alex's daughter was away for the summer, too, in Colorado with her father (supposedly hiking, likely in front of an array of screens),

Sadie's smile a metallic gleam of the most expensive, longest-running batch of braces in history, like some well-loved, sentimental Broadway musical.

It's just that we want to love them, these men," said Alex. An intensely bittersweet sensation riveted her body. "We really do." "I don't," said her daughter. "You might someday," Alex said. "Never.

She ran off the hate she had for herself, ingrained since a young age from a mesmerizing array of influences: things her father said and did, things her mother didn't say and do, magazines, television, girls she went to high school with, a hundred men whistling at her on the street, America in general. She loathed herself, she forgave herself. She loathed them, she did not forgive them.

He texts me on Wednesday and asks if I want to have dinner with him on Friday night. I say I have plans because I'm trying to play hard to get, which has absolutely never worked for me in my entire life. He

He respected a person's right to weakness.

How would you like it if someone you cared about just disappeared on you?

I HAD RECEIVED A beautiful email from the baby's father when I was still in Mongolia. Nature is wasteful, he had said. That's why there are so many pinecones on the forest floor—his mother had pointed them out to him once when he was a child, and explained that nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.

She had given up on her parents years ago. Things would never be honest between them. So why bother with any relationship at all?

She cracked a window and put on some stew.