Big Little Lies

They say it's good to let your grudges go, but I don't know, I'm quite fond of my grudge. I tend it like a little pet.

All conflict can be traced back to someone’s feelings getting hurt, don’t you think?

I mean a fat, ugly man can still be funny and lovable and successful,” continued Jane. “But it’s like it’s the most shameful thing for a woman to be.” “But you weren’t, you’re not—” began Madeline. “Yes, OK, but so what if I was!” interrupted Jane. “What if I was! That’s my point. What if I was a bit overweight and not especially pretty? Why is that so terrible? So disgusting? Why is that the end of the world?

Every day I think, ‘Gosh, you look a bit tired today,’ and it’s just recently occurred to me that it’s not that I’m tired, it’s that this is the way I look now.

It’s because a woman’s entire self-worth rests on her looks,” said Jane. “That’s why. It’s because we live in a beauty-obsessed society where the most important thing a woman can do is make herself attractive to men.

Reading a novel was like returning to a once-beloved holiday destination.

Those we love don’t go away, they sit beside us every day.

Nothing and nobody could aggravate you the way your child could aggravate you.

Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else.

It had never crossed her mind that sending your child to school would be like going back to school yourself.

Did anyone really know their child? Your child was a little stranger, constantly changing, disappearing and reintroducing himself to you. New personality traits could appear overnight.

First kisses didn’t necessarily require darkness and alcohol, they could happen in the open air, with the sun warm on your face and everything around you honest and real and true.

women are like the Olympic athletes of grudges.

Little kids, little problems. Wait till you’ve got drugs and sex and social media to worry about.

If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself.

Bonnie and her mum are both members of Amnesty International," said Abigail. "Of course they are," murmured Madeline. This must be how Jennifer Aniston feels, thought Madeline, whenever she hears about Angelina and Brad adopting another orphan or two.

If parents had children who were good sleepers, they assumed this was due to their good parenting, not good luck.

Children did this. They sensed when there was something controversial or sensitive and they pushed and pushed like tiny prosecutors.

She’d swallowed it whole and pretended it meant nothing, and therefore it had come to mean everything.

This was not the career she'd dreamed of as an ambitious seventeen-year-old, but now it was hard to remember ever feeling innocent and audacious enough to dream of a certain type of life, as if you got to choose how things turned out.

She’d never really believed in it before. Then, as she hit her late thirties, her body said, OK, you don’t believe in PMS? I’ll show you PMS. Get a load of this, bitch. Now, for one day every month, she had to fake everything: her basic humanity, her love for her children, her love for Ed. She’d once been appalled to hear of women claiming PMS as a defense for murder. Now she understood. She could happily murder someone today! In fact, she felt like there should be some sort of recognition for her remarkable strength of character that she didn’t.

When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy.

But every time she tried yoga she found herself silently chanting her own mantra: I’m so boooored, I’m so boooored.

Helicopter parents. Before I started at Pirriwee Public, I thought it was an exaggeration, this thing about parents being overly involved with their kids. I mean, my mum and dad loved me, they were, like, interested in me when I was growing up in the nineties, but they weren't, like, obsessed with me.

As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. Forty. She could still feel "forty" the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colorless age. Marooned in the middle of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn't have real feelings when you were forty, because you'd be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty-ness. Forty-year-old woman found dead. Oh dear. Twenty-year-old woman found dead. Tragedy! Sadness! Find that murderer!

Mothers took their mothering so seriously now. Their frantic little faces...Ponytails swinging. Eyes fixed on the mobile phones held in the palms of their hands like compasses.

but sometimes doing the wrong thing was also right.

The boys had always been her reason to stay, but now for the first time they were her reason to leave. She'd allowed violence to become a normal part of their life.