The thing about trauma is that it can split a person right down the middle. And J. was, indeed, bifurcated in this way. That is, she occupied multiple timelines simultaneously.
The Last Days . . . has nothing much to do with tennis or with Roger Federer, who appears sparingly in these pages . . . [nor is it] “intended to be a comprehensive study of last things, or of lastness generally.”
On the farm, I understand exactly the degree to which I have come to depend on alcohol, since in the first three weeks I think about it frequently and get worried and even look for it twice in the farmer’s house, and on the fourth week I am less interested, and on the fifth week I do other things.
If you go to a poetry reading, the aphoristic moments are usually where the audience lets out a collective “hmmm” or “ahhh”—almost before the poet has finished the sentence.
Before my father killed her, my mother spent her evenings telling me the story of how she came to America. Every night, the way she started was with something new.
I think people want more unstressed time with their kids. I think so much of the time we are spending with our kids we are exhausted, and we have all this other stuff on our minds that’s mentally draining, physically draining. But the answer is not always more childcare.