Quotes from Jami Attenberg

Barbra joined her at the table and sipped from an enormous glass of water filled with lemon slices. Ah, yes, and there's her lunch, she thought.

I am distracted by the world around me and my family's issues and my lackluster career and how all the wheels keep spinning and I have never learned how to steer.

Then she calls me and she's crying and we talk for a while about her marriage and while I am sad that my friend is sad, it makes me happier than ever that I've never been married and never will be, because marriage sounds like a goddamn job, and why would I want another one of those?

I can't stand when a meal is ruined. I have slept with many men, don't ask me their names, but I can't eat anything casually. Don't fuck with my food, I want to say to him.

This is not a date; this is an audition for a play about a terrible date.

Alex was delighted and astonished with her mother for behaving as a mother should for once.

I'll admit that each time I've seen her I've spilled my guts and felt cleansed. Then I become convinced I never need to see her again.

Cock size was a thing she hadn't talked about since college, now that she thought about it. Who discusses such things when they get older? Who has the leisure time?)

I'm certain there's something passive-aggressive going on here, but I can't get in touch with my feelings right now, or maybe I'm having several feelings at once and it's too noisy to hear the high notes.

I own these words. I own these ideas. Here is my book.

All I know is you cannot force it.

I know you don't like him," said her mother. "Your father has always been a complicated man." "I'll say," said Alex. "But you're complicated, too. And he loves you," Barbra said. "He always thought you were smart and capable, and no one was prouder of you when you graduated from law school. He said, 'She can get me out of jail someday.

Even at the end he couldn't be anything but bad. There would be no rehabilitation for him, no redemption. Some people are just bad forever.

There was Barbra, sitting among all her objects, all of the things she loved best in the world; a tableau of capitalism.

He had been good with presents, she'll give him that, that ghost. Payoffs were his specialty.

You allow yourself that pleasure of liking yourself. What if this is enough?

I always reel for a few days after I witness someone's personal truth. I walk around feeling like I'm wearing their essence like a tight sweater.

I kiss him and he kisses me and we laugh and we are close and I believe so deeply in that moment that I can tolerate his bullshit.

I wake up the next morning and dress in all black, secret spy style. My mother eyes me and asks if I'm depressed, and I say, "No, I'm just cool.

We have expectations of our friends. I thought she was gone forever, off to Baby World, like all the other people in my life who've had children: Miriam,

The solution was to write my way out of the problem. That meant writing early in the morning, late at night, and on weekends. It meant carving out time, claiming it for myself. I thought: I will write this first book, and then maybe another after that. This is the thing I want to do.

There are plenty of reasons why I write. This is just one of them. The sense that I want to own something, own my work, own my creativity, own my name. It is perhaps not the purest reason, not truest of heart, for there is some ego attached to it. But it is real.

Look, you had it easier than me,' she says. 'You think Nana and Papa were busy supporting women's rights? No, they wanted me to meet a nice man and get married and cook and clean for him and give them grandchildren, and that's it. You were born into a world where feminism existed and was readily available to you. I had to acquire that knowledge. I didn't know I could be on my own.

It was not about him loving her. They'd had so many ebbs and flows. They were in this life together; what they needed from each other was clearly defined. In these moments she felt they were connected by so much: distance, space, money, silence, support. And every so often the acknowledgment of each other's humanity.