She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder while others made one tiny, careless mistake and paid a terrible price.
Catalog
Liane Moriarty
Liane Moriarty (born 15 November 1966) is an Australian author. She is the older sister of author Jaclyn Moriarty. 2CareerEdit After leaving school, Moriarty worked in advertising and marketing at a legal publishing company. She then ran her own company for a while before taking work as a freelance advertising copywriter. In 2004, after obtaining a master's degree at Macquarie University in Sydney her first novel Three Wishes, written as part of the degree, was published. Five further novels have been published. Moriarty lives in Sydney with her husband, Adam, a former farmer from Tasmania who worked in agricultural marketing, and two children, George and Ann
It wasn’t logical, but the better you knew someone, the more blurry they became. The accumulation of facts made them disappear. It was more interesting wondering if someone did or didn’t like country music than knowing one way or the other.
You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else’s tragedy—drowning in icy waters, living in a city split by a wall—but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you.
She longed to feel something momentous. Sometimes her life seemed so little.
It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or most ridiculous, trite little fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you’d shared a bathroom and a bank…
Perhaps nothing was ever ‘meant to be.’ There was just life, and right now, and doing your best. Being a bit bendy.
Marriage was a form of insanity; love hovering permanently on the edge of aggravation.
Falling in love was easy. Anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky.
It seemed truly frightening that it was only by sheer chance that she had met Nick. It could so easily not have happened and then she would have had a shadowy, half-alive existence, like some sort of woodland creature who never sees sunlight, never even knowing how much she could love and how much…
It was good to remember that for every horrible memory from her marriage, there was also a happy one. She wanted to see it clearly, to understand that it wasn’t all black, or all white. It was a million colors.
She was busy thinking about the concept of forgiveness. It was such a lovely, generous idea when it wasn't linked to something awful that needed forgiving.
She was remembering what it was like when you broke up with someone. Conversations became so hopelessly tangled. You had to be polite and precise. You couldn’t safely criticize anymore, because you didn’t have the right. You’d lost your immunity.
The medication, the hormones, and the relentless frustrations of our lives make us bitchy and you're not allowed to be bitchy in public or people won't like you.
Wouldn't it be a lot less messy if everyone just stayed with the people they married in the first place?
Just because a marriage ended didn't mean that it hadn't been happy at times.
She had always thought that exquisitely happy time at the beginning of her relationship with Nick was the ultimate, the feeling they'd always be trying to replicate, to get back, but now she realized that was wrong. That was like comparing sparkling mineral water to French champagne.
But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums.
Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It's light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you've hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you've seen the worst and the best--Well,…