Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

Loneliness is not about how many people you have around. It’s about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you’re able to be yourself.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SøREN KIERKEGAARD

As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.

The lonely feeling comes from not feeling known.

I know that no one’s story is simple. And no single story tells the whole truth.

You have no idea how much you can learn about yourself by plunging into someone else’s life” Margot said. I smiled at her, not fully understanding what she was saying but feeling a small ping of comprehension, an olive pit smacking the wall of my consciousness. “You can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself” Margot promised.

Why is it that an insult stays with you forever, whereas love and praise passes through you like water through a sieve?

If there was one truth that I'd learned from all my reading, it was this: Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene. This time, that someone was me.

Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I'd been running for so very long and pass along the inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. My daughter could do her best to outrun it... Or I could slow down, catch my breath, and look mindfully for a new path. There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.

Does your life feel authentically your own?

I felt as if I were watching myself from above, unable to comprehend the happiness of the people around me.

I turned to memory, knowing full well that it is revisionist and that each time we remember something, we alter it slightly, massaging our perspective and layering it with new understanding in order to make meaning in the present.

His response was incomprehensible to me. How could you not want to know...Wasn't curiosity a simple fact of human nature?

Aristotle famously suggested that through the mirror of friendship, people are able to see themselves in ways that are otherwise inaccessible

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —ANAïS NIN

I knew only what pleased my mother; I didn't have a moral compass. It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became and recognized the hurt that we both caused.

All I knew at that moment was I felt lucky. My mother had chosen me , and, together, we were embarking on a great adventure.

My mother had narrowed her vision and chosen happiness, and I had willingly signed on, both of us ignoring the dangers of the new terrain.

Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it. For years and years, my job was to pile on sand - fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated - in an effort to keep my mother's secret buried.

A buried truth, that’s all a lie really is.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

You can read your way into a whole new narrative for yourself," margot promised

Desperate to become enriched by books, I sometimes barely remembered what I'd read, yet the unconscious effect of so many sentences felt cumulative, like recurring dreams.

But I also found my depression tedious - tedious to live through, tedious to explain, tedious to be around. I was bored by my own relentless loop and felt sure I was boring everyone around me.

Piece of cake," she said. "Your mother's just lonely." I was dumbfounded. Malabar had dinner parties almost every weekend; she had been juggling two men for years. "My mother's not lonely," I said. "You're wrong," said Kyra. "Loneliness is not about how many people you have around. It's about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you're able to be yourself." I was at a loss for words. Was Malabar not being herself when she was being Malabar? "You know what I mean," Kyra said, breaking it down for me. "The lonely feeling comes from not being known.

We spoke on the phone regularly and turned to text when she could no longer talk. What would I do without her? Her answer came in her final text message to me, written on the morning of her death: Where is Nora Ephron when we need her? I took this to mean “Embrace the mess, live fully, carry on.

In our family, being right trumped being truthful. There was no room for uncertainty, so you never let down your guard.

Malabar was growing impatient. How was she to manage unfulfillment lurking on one side and Charles’s death calling from the other? Simple. She filled a shaker with ice, poured in the bourbon, and wrapped herself in a blanket of alcohol to dull the hurt and deaden the guilt as she rode around and around, endlessly circling the life she wanted, that gold ring just out of reach. When Malabar made a power pack, that dry Manhattan with a twist, she would pause for a moment, consider the shaker, then add another shot of booze. For years when I made Manhattans, I did the same.