Nine Perfect Strangers

Sometimes your life changes so slowly and imperceptibly that you don't notice it at all until one day you wake up and think, 'How did I get here?' But other times, life changes in an instant with a lightning stroke of good or bad luck with glorious or tragic consequences.

He could find hatred in his heart for her, too, if he went looking for it. The secret of a happy marriage was not to go looking for it.

Men often used that phrase: “drop some weight.” They said it without shame or emotion, as if the weight were an object they could easily put down when they chose. Women said they needed to “lose weight,” with their eyes down, as if the extra weight was part of them, a terrible sin they’d committed.

The lowest point of your life can lead to the highest.

Women and their bodies! The most abusive and toxic of relationships.

No one could be expected to give up wine and books at the same time.

You are a woman in the prime of your life! You should march into a room with your head held high! Like you are walking onto a stage, a battlefield!

You never changed your appearance for men. You changed it for other women. Because they were the ones carefully tracking each others weight and skin tone along with their own. They were the ones trapped with you on the ridiculous appearance obsession merry go round that they couldn't or wouldn't get off.

Time went by so fast these days. There was some sort of malfunctioning going on with how fast Earth was spinning. Decades went by as quick as years once did.

Frances longed to Google it. How was she going to cope for ten days without instant answers to idle questions?

Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it. George Carlin

She had not realised that grief was so physical. Before Zach died, she thought grief happened in your head. She didn’t know that your whole body ached with it, that it screwed up your digestive system, your menstrual cycle, your sleep patterns, your skin. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.

Relax and enjoy the journey. The stream will carry you this way and that, but will carry you forward to where you need to go.

I don't get the obsession with strangers, her first husband, Sol, once said to her, and Frances had struggled to explain that strangers were by definition interesting. It was their strangeness. The not-knowing. Once you knew everything there was to know about someone, you were generally ready to divorce them.

Heather had grown up starved of love, and when you’re starved of something you should receive in abundance, you never quite trust it.

Carmel experienced another burst of euphoria. She might have lost a husband, but she got herself a wife. An efficient, energetic young wife. What a bargain. What an upgrade.

She remembered her first-ever boyfriend of over thirty years ago, who told her he preferred smaller breasts than hers, while his hands were on her breasts, as if she’d find this interesting, as if women’s body parts were dishes on a menu and men were the goddamned diners. This is what she said to that first boyfriend: “Sorry.” This was her first boyfriend’s benevolent reply: “That’s okay.

He hadn’t left her for something better, but for something new.

You suppose you are the trouble But you are the cure You suppose that you are the lock on the door But you are the key that opens it Rumi

Don’t let your heart be a casualty of your head.

As she swam she gloried in the fact that there was nowhere to be, nothing to do, no one to worry about. No jazz pickup or karate drop-off, no homework to supervise, no birthday gifts to buy, no doctors’ appointments to book; the endless multitude of teeny-tiny details that made up her life. Each obligation on its own seemed laughably easy. It was the sheer volume that threatened to bury her.

It looked like girls were controlled by their feelings but the opposite was true. Girls had excellent control of their feelings. They spun them around like batons: Now I’m crying! Now I’m laughing! Who knows what I’ll do next! Not you! A boy’s emotions were like baseball bats that blindsided him.

When Frances was eight years old, a man patted her mother's bottom as he walked past them on a suburban street. "Nice arse," he said in a friendly tone. Frances remembered thinking, Oh, that's kind of him. And then she'd watched in shock as her five-foot-nothing mother chased the man to the corner and swung a heavy handbag full of hardback library books at the back of his head.

An endless gossamer-like sentence embroidered with jewel-like metaphors, far too many clauses, and a meaning so obscure it had to be profound wrapped itself around Frances’s neck, but it really didn’t suit her, so she wrenched it off and flung it into space, where it floated free until at last a shy author on his way to a festival to accept a prize grabbed it from the sky and used it to gag one of his beautiful corpses. It looked lovely on her. Gray-bearded critics applauded with relief, grateful it hadn’t ended up in a beach read.

She generally felt that the advice she offered was superior to the advice she received. Other people’s problems were so simple; one’s own problems tended to be so much more nuanced.

If the counselor ever wrote a book about her experience as a marriage counselor she would probably mention it: I once had a patient who treated his car more tenderly than he treated his wife. (No need to mention the car was a Lamborghini, otherwise all the male readers would say, “Oh, well, then.”)

A well-managed breakdown can turn out to be a good thing,” he told Yao. “Try to see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to grow and learn about yourself.

She had no idea of her weight and no interest in learning it. She knew she could be thinner, and of course when she was younger she was indeed much thinner, but she was generally happy with her body as long as it wasn’t giving her pain, and bored by all the different ways women droned on about the subject of weight, as if it were one of the great mysteries of life. The recent weight-losers, evangelical about whatever method had worked for them, the thin women who called themselves fat, the average women who called themselves obese, the ones desperate for her to join in their lavish self-loathing. “Oh, Frances, isn’t it just so depressing when you see young, thin girls like that!” “Not especially,” Frances would say, adding extra butter to her bread roll.

Everywhere Frances looked there were children: children sitting gravely behind news desks, controlling traffic, running writers' festivals, taking her blood pressure, managing her taxes, and fitting her bras.