[b]Meg Wolitzer
It was exhausting being a schizophrenic.[/b]
Even more exhausting: figuring out if you actually were.
Everything you do, it’ll all feel really slow for a long time. But looking back, much later, it will have seemed like it was fast.
You know, in the shadow of, among other things, the abyss.
He’d had a real talent, but what was talent without confidence, self-possession, “ownership,” as people said, pompously but maybe accurately.
How’s that different [for some] from having no talent?
My job does not define me.
Not so sure about your own job are you?
The way Susannah sings ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ is so sad, he murmured.
Yeah, it really is.
It makes me think of the way people devote their lives to each other, and then one of them just leaves, or even dies.
I hadn’t thought of it that way, said Jules, who had never understood those lyrics, in particular how a single wind could carry two people apart. I know this sounds picky, but wouldn’t the wind carry them together? she asked. It’s one breeze. It just blows one way, not two.
Huh. Let me think about it. He thought briefly. You’re right. It doesn’t make sense. But still, it’s very melancholy.
Lots of lyrics like that though.
All that reading took. It became as basic as any other need. To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life, the drafty, disorganized, lumbering bus of a house, the disinterested parents.
You know, back when novels actually accomplished this.