It feels like you can’t breathe, but you actually are breathing. It feels like you’ll never stop crying, but you actually will.
Catalog
Book
The Husband's Secret
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF BIG LITTLE LIES. One of the Best Books of the Year—Entertainment Weekly One of the Top Ten Books of the Year—People </
Characters
A son is a son until he takes him a wife; a daughter is a daughter for all of her life.
Then he kissed her so deeply and so completely that she felt like she was falling, floating, spiraling down, down, down, like Alice in Wonderland.
She longed to feel something momentous. Sometimes her life seemed so little.
One day you’ll turn forty and you’ll slowly realize you don’t feel the eyes anymore, and the freedom is a relief, but you’ll also sort of miss it, and when a truck driver whistles at you while you’re crossing the road, you’ll think, Really? For me?
Weren’t women allowed to be sexist for the next two thousand years or so, until they’d evened up the score?
She wanted to be falling in love, not trying to fix a broken relationship. She wanted to be someone’s first choice, not their second.
Did one act define who you were forever? Did one evil act as a teenager counteract twenty years of marriage, of good marriage, twenty years of being a good husband and a good father? Murder and you are a murderer. That was how it worked for other people. For strangers.
It feels like you can’t breathe, but you actually are breathing. It feels like you’ll never stop crying, but you actually will.
The words 'I'm sorry' felt like an insult. You said 'I'm sorry' when you bumped against someone's supermarket trolley. There need to be bigger words.
Was there anything better than to be wanted? Was that all anyone really needed?
This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine. You ignored the deep, cramplike pain in your stomach. You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either.
When you were young you talked about ‘falling in love’ with such amusing gravity, as if it were an actual recordable event, when what was it really? Chemicals. Hormones. A trick of the mind.
It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship.
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.
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 accou…
Perhaps nothing was ever ‘meant to be.’ There was just life, and right now, and doing your best. Being a bit bendy.