Maggie Smith Quotes

Soulmates. That was the word. Maggie could sense what it meant. Two people connected, bound to each other forever, soul to soul, in a way that even death couldn't break. Two souls that were destined for each other.

And just then Damon stepped out of the coat closet, and at the same time Aunt Maggie tripped him neatly and said, “Bathroom door beside you,” and picked up a vase and hit the rising Damon over the head with it. Hard.

What is a week-end? Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

We talk so much of  light, please let me speak on behalf of  the good dark. Let us talk more of how dark the beginning of a day is. —Maggie Smith, from “How Dark the Beginning,” Poetry (February 2020)

Ask yourself about the kind of life you want: What would you do day to day, and with whom, and where? Consider the life you have. Do one thing today, however small, to close the gap between the two.

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. —Emily Dickinson

When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.

Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.

When life held your hand in the flames, it taught you something about the kind of burning you can endure. You survived: don’t forget that, and don’t diminish it. KEEP MOVING.

How much do they be paying you?" he asked mellowly. "The usual salary. A little more than they think I'm worth and a little less than I think I'm worth.

It is not your job to make other people comfortable with who you are.

Good Bones" Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

This is what it is to be rooted in a place, or to have a place rooted inside you: Every bit means something to someone you know, and therefore, every bit means something to you.

Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done.

Accept that you are a work in progress, both a revision and a draft: you are better and more complete than earlier versions of yourself, but you also have work to do. Be open to change. Allow yourself to be revised.

We say in the grand scheme of things as if there were one. We say that's not how the world works as if the world works.

I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone.

In all these places, I loved that person. I loved him. Where does that go? The love is in all of these places—haunting?—and in none of them. The love is everywhere and nowhere.

What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time. I would have done it for longer if he’d let me.

I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.

We all come into the world unfinished, still stitching ourselves together.

Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.

It was the sort of situation that would be ever so charming and warmly human in a film with Peter Ustinov and Maggie Smith but that sort of film is only charming because they leave out so many details, and real life is all the details they leave out.

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was. Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence. I still carry these versions of myself. It's a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

Don't wait for your life to magically come together--it's your work to do. Every day, every moment, you are making your life from scratch. Today, take one step, however small, toward creating a life you can be proud of.

Tim curled up in a corner of the backseat, sheltering his penguin from the storm, all tensed up in “scandalized Maggie Smith” pose.

Is my gardener's pride to be sacrificed on the altar of Mr Molesley's ambitions? - The Dowager Countess(Maggie Smith)

Stop searching yourself trying to understand why someone else treated you the way they did. The answer is not inside you; it's inside them, out of reach.

The best things to happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage. And then, this: But the best things remain.

As if you have to break someone’s heart to make them strong. I could say you don’t get to take credit for someone’s growth if they grow as a result of what you put them through.

Now my wandering days are over. It will be bliss to settle down. Bliss. There's a word, now. Bliss to love and to be loved.

Mourning a living person is different from mourning the dead. A woman whose husband dies is a widow. But there is no word for a person who grieves a living person—a child, a partner, an estranged family member or dear friend. There is no name for what you are when a part of your life and identity dies, but you go on living. There is no name for what you are when you outlive the life you expected to have and find yourself in a kind of afterlife.

Was this my proudest moment? No. I was not my best self that night. I gave all the fucks, I thought. Why was I the one giving all the fucks? Where were his fucks?

Start making yourself at home in your life as it is.

I am offering the only thing I have. I am holding out my hand, feeding myself to the hungry future.

Close the gap between yourself and your spirit--the person you know you can be. Let your choices reflect the person you want to become, not just the person you think you are.

At my age, I don’t plan that far ahead. I don’t even buy green bananas.” Maggie Smith in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

I’m trying to tell you the truth, so let me be clear: I didn’t want this lemonade. My kids didn’t want this lemonade. This lemonade was not worth the lemons. And yet, the lemons were mine. I had to make something from them, so I did. I wrote. I’ll drink to that.

The body remains a house unaware of its rooms.

Maybe this is a story of two human beings who committed to each other very young and didn’t survive one another’s changes.

I wanted to save my marriage, but I wanted to save it without anyone knowing it needed saving. That is some serious firstborn-daughter energy right there.

Recognize the difference between The End and An End.

Stop calling your heart broken; your heart works just fine. If you are feeling--love, anger, gratitude, grief--it is because your heart is doing its work. Let it.

How I picture it: For months, maybe even years, I folded and folded my happiness until I couldn’t fold it anymore, until it fit under my tongue, and I held it there. I kept silent in order to hold it. I taught myself to read his face and dim mine, a good mirror.

God, all those months of seeing Kelsey’s pictures and hearing about her travels, and I had been raging with jealousy. And now it was my turn. I wanted to mind the gap at the tube station and eat fish and chips and try to make the Queen’s guards laugh. I wanted to see Big Ben and the Globe and the London Bridge and Dame Judi Dench. Or Maggie Smith. Or Alan Rickman. Or Sir Ian McKellen. Or anybody famous and British, really. Holy crap. This was really happening. And I wasn’t just a tourist. I was visiting with someone who’d grown up in the city. With my fiancé. Take that, world.

It’s a mistake to think of one’s life as plot, to think of the events of one’s life as events in a story. It’s a mistake. And yet, there’s foreshadowing everywhere, foreshadowing I would’ve seen myself if I’d been watching a play or reading a novel, not living a life.

What is embarrassment but a relative of fear? You've been seen—caught—at being imperfect.

Give the present the gift of your full attention.

The mind is mysterious. A master of sleight of hand.

We can endure anything if we know when it will end, but I had no idea when it would end.

I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.

Likewise, parents are not wise oracles—they’re just people trying to shepherd other people through the world. We may know the right path to take, but knowing the way and consistently walking it are two different things. Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.

Imagine, if you will, a sharper, crueler version of Maggie Smith, and you’ll have some semblance of an idea of my grandmother. Add an unhealthy dose of botulinum toxin, and there’s your visual.

Torma means “offering cake.” You offer the torma to your don. You feed the ghost that does you harm, “that which possesses you.” Giving it a little something sweet is a way of saying, Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.

It was completely illogical: as if part of me wanted him back, and part of me wanted him to disappear, and nothing in between would do. Or: I wanted my husband back, and I wanted the stranger he'd become to disappear.

You know what one of the saddest damn things is? One of the parts of all this that I’m grieving the most? When I lost my marriage, I lost all that shared history. I lost the person who knew me in a way no one else does, and when I lost him, I also lost being known like that.

A silver lining of being alone is being with someone you can trust, someone you respect and understand. You can let your guard down when you're by yourself. You can give yourself permission to live your authentic life, without apology. You can love yourself in a way that no one else can.

They came together, they loved and they married. In innocence, and never dreaming how courageous they were, they started a new life together and a new generation of their own.

(Is that what a memoir is—a ghost tour? I’m confronting what haunts me. I’m out with lanterns, looking.)

Do not be ashamed of the intensity of your emotion. That's your humanity. Grief can be feral, wild, frightening. Give it a safe place to live.

My handwriting is all over these woods. No, my handwriting is these woods, each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl, each loop a limb. My house is somewhere here, & I have scribbled myself inside it. What is home but a book we write, then read again & again, each time dog-earing different pages...

Fight the urge to withdraw, to fold in on yourself, as if your pain is contagious and might infect someone else. We are here to take care of one another; the care is what's catching, spreading person to person to person. So take--and give--care.

I don’t have to understand everything, and I don’t believe understanding is owed me. I don’t get 2001: A Space OdysseyI—fine, I can live with that. But my own life? It would be nice to get it.

That bit of blue doesn't belong to them, and they don't belong to the sky, or to the earth, or to us. Isn't that what you've been taught — nothing is ours? Haven't you learned to keep the loosest possible hold?

But every teacher is human. Likewise, parents are not wise oracles—they’re just people trying to shepherd other people through the world. We may know the right path to take, but knowing the way and consistently walking it are two different things. Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.

It’s too late to do anything about the inequity in my now-kaput marriage. But I made the list of tasks anyway. I wanted to see in black and white what I’d been doing in the marriage. Reader, I was going to show you the list, but I decided against it. You don’t need the list. Looking at it, I thought, No wonder so many divorced men get remarried right away and so many divorced women stay on their own.

But feeling lonely when you’re with your partner is worse than being alone. Being with someone who doesn’t want the best for you is worse than being alone. I could say that when I think about my dream partner, what I want in that person is so basic, so low-bar, I’m almost ashamed to say it out loud: Someone who’s happy to see me. Someone who smiles when I walk into a room. Someone who can be happy with me and for me

By the time you’re reading this sentence, I want to have let go, to have wrestled myself free of this ghost, to have forgiven. I want to be able to say, Thank you, pain, for being my teacher. This book is my torma, my offering. Please take it. Taste its sweetness.

The thing about birds: If we knew nothing of jays or wrens or sparrows, we'd believe the trees were singing, as if each tree has its own song. The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful.

Your work is being yourself, offering what you can to others. You’ve been doing it all along. Now do it with intention.

Memory, too, is assemblage—a kind of cento, collaged from pieces. From the scraps of a life.

What is home but a book we write, then read again & again, each time dog-earing different pages.

A memoir is about ‘the art of memory,’ and part of the art is in the curation.

Sometimes I feel like I titled this book Kittens and Rainbows, and then I wrote hell.

I didn't feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post.

The Finder stopped knowing how to tell herself the story of her life. Where there had been a future, or at least the promise of one, there was now an ellipsis: dot dot dot.

I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.

There is a difference between what is built in the body and what is built in the imagination.

It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

I’m trying so hard to forgive. I’m wishing hard for peace in every superstitious way. Wishing for it deep inside me, where the truest things live.

I have to trust this: If what I give my children is love, then they’re receiving it. If I seek to understand them, then they will feel understood. Embraced. Fathomed.

Sometimes yes looks like reminding yourself of what is still possible. I went to find beauty, and it was still there. I go looking for it, and it’s there.

It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. —Joan Didion

You don’t have to be in love to have love in your life. Take stock of everything—and everyone—that fills your heart.

It is not your job to make other people comfortable with who you are. Be wary of those who don't want you to change or grow. Grow anyway--there is no alternative.

I’d been trying to save the marriage, but I needed to save myself.

Speak without silencing others. Listen without losing your own voice. KEEP MOVING.

Commit to doing at least one thing in service of your writing every day.

Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It's still there, but we'd have to open and open and open ourselves -- our together selves -- to find it.

We feel and feel, and live and live, but somehow we’re never full. This life is elastic, impossibly elastic. There is always room for more experience. Our lives expand to accommodate anything.

I called my parents. My mother answered, and I told her what happened, no doubt full of adrenaline: “I just got hit by lightning! At the window!” “That’s what you get for living in sin,” she said dryly.

Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home. I’m starring and underlining this fact for future reference.

Do not be led by fear; fear cannot lead you out of the dark. Find whatever bits of hope you can--a trail of even the smallest bread crumbs, even the tiniest pebbles reflecting the moonlight--and follow them.

He doesn’t pass these landmarks from our years together every day, but I do. I still live in one of them. Do those memories warp without their mirrors, without someone to reflect them, to keep them true, to show them their twin? Do our separate memories grow on their own into two different things, unrecognizable to one another? Do we?

Most importantly, he redlined any instance of me crying. The man I’d befriended in a writing workshop tried to delete my grief on the page. Redacting tears? That was a new one. I was dumbfounded. I didn’t accept those edits.

You are not betraying your grief by feeling joy. You are not being graded, and you do not receive extra credit for being miserable 100% of the time. Find pockets of relief, even happiness, when and where you can. KEEP MOVING.

William James used a term I find myself returning to often: torn-to-pieces-hood. This was his translation of the German word Zerrissenheit, which carries inside it a sense of tornness, brokenness, disconnection, disjointedness

Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist advised, if you want to change. If you’re in enough pain, you won’t be able to continue living the way you’ve been living; you’ll have to do something differently. But be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it—and then what? Then the pain is yours. The pain is yours and it will change you.

BRIDE How long have I been wed to myself? Calling myself darling, dressing for my own pleasure, each morning choosing perfume to turn me on. How long have I been alone in this house but not alone? Married less to the man than to the woman silvering with the mirror. I know the kind of wife I need and I become her: the one who will leave this earth at the same instant I do. I am my own bride, lifting the veil to see my face. Darling, I say, I have waited for you all my life.

It was a full-circle moment, and there would be many of them. Because time is recursive, because we repeat ourselves again and again, because all the things I’d done married I would now do unmarried. Because I was the same and completely different.

I wonder: How will my children feel if they think that being seen as a mother wasn’t enough for me? What will they think of me, knowing I wanted a full life—a life with them and a life in words, too? I’m dog-earing a realization in my mind now: I don’t think fathers are asking themselves these questions. Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home. I’m starring and underlining this fact for future reference.

But the more time passed, the less I hurt. The less I hurt, the more I was able to see how beautiful, how full, my life was. I felt myself smiling as I walked in my neighborhood. My eyes followed the calls of birds to find them in the trees—grackles, woodpeckers, crows, robins, blue jays, cardinals. I’d built a life in which my days were like this: taking long walks, writing, mothering, cackling over coffee or cocktails with friends, sleeping alone some nights, being held close by someone I loved other nights. I was unfolding, learning to take up space. Life began to feel open enough, elastic enough, to contain whatever I might choose for it.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

Is this why we write? To bronze the baby shoes? To save all of it? The zippered coats, the somehow endless buckling and unbuckling of car seat harnesses, the sticky hands, the fought naps, the acorns secreted into my pockets and purses, the crumbs on everything, always?

The thing is, flowers die when you pick them. As soon as you cut them and put them in a vase, the clock’s on. You’re displaying them as something beautiful, and the whole time they’re decomposing. Sometimes I think our marriage was like that. As soon as it began, it was beginning to end.

Sometimes many plans are necessary, a whole alphabet of plans. Sometimes I need to hear the same thing in different words from different people, different sources, before I really hear it. The answer knocks on all the doors, tries all the windows, then slips in over the transom if it must.

This isn’t a tell-all because some of what I’m telling you is what I don’t know. I’m offering the absences, too—the spaces I know aren’t empty, but I can’t see what’s inside them. Like the white spaces between stanzas in a poem: What is unspoken, unwritten there? How do we read those silences

Being strong, bracing yourself against hurt, can get in the way of actual healing; the real work.

In any mystery, the answers tend to arrive in disguise. So often they’re clothed in trouble. Why do answers wear trouble so well? Maybe because they need to get our attention.

Memory itself is a kind of architecture. —Louise Bourgeois

have no idea what the next twenty years of my life will look like, only that they won’t—can’t—look like the last twenty years. That forest has burned. And yet. And yet!

Nothing predates danger.

The first time you see something die, you won’t know it might come back. I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.

What I didn't say is when I lost my family, I lost someone. The Person I'd called my person. In this way, my house is haunted.

My son's tooth was still in his mouth when his father picked him up. It wasn't ready to come out. It wanted to stay where it was.

I believe that I am past my prime. I had reckoned on my prime lasting till I was at least fifty.

It’s late but everything comes next.

My mother loved you as her own son and you broke her heart.

No wonder so many divorced men get remarried right away and so many divorced women stay on their own.

Maybe I shouldn’t have accepted any of them, but I was trying to keep the peace. Now I think, What peace?

The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful.

what a complete mindfuck it is to lose the shelter of your marriage, but also how expansive the view is without that shelter, how big the sky is—

Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change.

I’ve had to move into—and through—the darkness to find the beauty. Spoiler alert: It’s there. The beauty’s there.

Any piece of writing is a time capsule. It reflects the choices—and the abilities, and the limitations—of the writer we are at the time.

Art is a site of wonder and discovery—or rediscovery. Art is a place where we might learn what we think, not a place where we teach the reader what we've already processed.

In another, we learn that coral and jellyfish are technically immortal. If in a safe environment, they would live forever.

If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.

What is home but a passage I'm writing & underlining every time I read it

attention a form of currency we pay to things we value.

I’ve talked so much about loving the world without any idea how to do it.

When one person out-earns another in a marriage, is an imbalance of power inevitable? Is the spouse who earns less expected to take on more of the domestic labor? Is that the deal, spoken or unspoken?

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.

Stop focusing on what is behind you. It's growing smaller and smaller, miniaturizing in the distance; stop squinting at it, as if it has answers. Today, keep your eyes on where you are going, not where you have been.

She wouldn't disapprove of people who gave up philosophy or literary theory to do ordinary things." "Maybe not," mused Maggie. "If we eat pies, then we should never, not for one moment, look down on the making of them.

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. —Maggie Nelson

If you’re not careful, you can revise the life right out of a piece of writing. If you’re not careful, you can scrub all the weirdness and wildness right out of it. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you can polish it dull.

Do those memories warp without their mirrors, without someone to reflect them, to keep them true, to show them their twin? Do our separate memories grow on their own into two different things, unrecognizable to one another?

Accept that you may never get to know what it means. Accept that there may not be a reason, despite the comfort that reasons provide. Don't look for meaning in whatever collapsed around you; make meaning by digging yourself out.

Remember a time when you forgave someone, how freeing that felt. You deserve your mercy as much as anyone else does. Forgive yourself for something today, something you wish you’d done differently. Just let it go. Free yourself from it.

If you feel that someone is being unkind or unfair to you, you don't want to be close to them. Then you aren't close to them, so you grow further apart. More unkindness, more distance. It's a vicious cycle, and breaking it requires deep work.

They talked a lot about boundaries. I was beginning to think I had a problem setting them. If taking care of others is part of my identity, the story I tell myself about myself, what would happen if I weren’t needed as a caregiver? What would the story be?

The Wife—The Mother, The Finder—would love to be someone who doesn’t give a fuck, or who at least gives considerably fewer fucks, but she is not that person. That’s not how she was built. The Wife’s factory setting is GAF. She gives so many fucks. All the fucks.

This is something I grieve: the severed tie to someone who knew me since college, the cokeeper of our memories, the person who could tell my kids what I was like during those years, the person who could tell me what I was like, the person I shared my life with. All of it, disposable.

The book you’re holding in your hands was many books before it was this one. Nested inside this version are the others: the version I began deep inside my sadness, thumbed into my phone in bed on sleepless nights; the one I scribbled out with sparks in my hair. You’ll see pieces of those books inside this one. Why? Because I’m trying to get to the truth, and I can’t get there except by looking at the whole, even the parts I don’t want to see. Maybe especially those parts. I’ve had to move into—and through—the darkness to find the beauty. Spoiler alert: It’s there. The beauty’s there.

Marriages are nesting dolls, too. We carry each iteration: the marriage we had before the children, the marriage of love letters and late nights at dive bars and train rides through France; the marriage we had after the children, the marriage of tenderness but transactional communication—who’s doing what, and when, and how—and early mornings and stroller walks and crayon on the walls and sunscreen that always needs to be reapplied; the marriage we had toward the end before we knew there was an end, the marriage of the silent treatment and couch sleeping and the occasional update email. Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves—our together selves—to find it. I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.

Commit yourself to the present. Loosen your grip on the life you had before—before a loss, an upheaval, a change that called everything into question—so that you can be here, where you’re needed, right now. KEEP MOVING. Do something today that will bring you joy even if you know you will not do it well.

At any given moment, I wonder: Is this the rising action? Has the climax already happened or are we not even there yet? When will the crisis end? How will it end? Where is the resolution? I crave the answer to when will it end even more than the answer to how. We can endure anything if we know when it will end.

The Wife—The Mother, The Finder—would love to be someone who doesn’t give a fuck, or who at least gives considerably fewer fucks, but she is not that person. That’s not how she was built. The Wife’s factory setting is GAF. She gives so many fucks. All the fucks. A NOTE ON BETRAYAL Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat.

Creativity isn't just about making art. Making your life is the ultimate creative act. I believe creativity is contagious, and when we put some of that into the world, it gets passed from person to person… I hope you're here because you know that embracing creativity will help you live a richer, more fulfilling, more connected life.

When I traveled, I planned carefully for minimal disruption to his schedule. I arranged playdates for after school or asked my parents for help. But I couldn’t pack lunches ahead, give baths ahead, make breakfasts ahead, get the kids dressed ahead, anticipate fevers or stomach flus ahead. Some things would have to be done in real time.

How I picture it: A scar is a story about pain, injury, healing. Years, too, are scars we wear. I remember their stories. The year everything changed. Kindergarten, fourth grade. The year of the pinecone, the postcard, the notebook. The year of waking in the night, sweating, heart racing. The year of being the only adult in the house, one baseball bat by the front door and another one under the bed. Or the year the divorce was finalized. First grade, fifth grade. Two houses, two beds, two Christmases, two birthdays. The year of where are your rain boots, they must be at Dad’s house. The year of who signed the permission slip? The year of learning to mow the lawn. The year of fixing the lawn mower, unclogging the toilets. The year I was tattooed with lemons. The year of sleeping with the dog instead of a husband. (The dog snores more quietly. The dog takes up less space.) The year of tweeting a note-to-self every day to keep myself moving. The year I kept moving. The year of sitting up at night, forgetting whether the kids were asleep in their beds or not. The year of waking in the morning and having to remember whether they were with me. The year I feared I would lose the house, and the year I did not lose the house. The year I wanted to cut a hole in the air and climb inside, and the year I didn’t want that at all. The year I decided not to disappear. The year I decided not to be small. The year I lived.

Let the hard days be hard. When you mourn a person, it’s a form of love. You mourn their loss because they mattered, because the world without them is diminished. Sit still with your grief if you need to, then lift it and carry it with you. KEEP MOVING. Take stock of what you can see in your life now that parts of it are gone: What view has that space created?

After nearly collapsing under the pressures of poverty, loneliness, and an addiction to Dexedrine, Spark sought help for her drug use and began to work seriously on a first novel, The Comforters (1957), partly with the financial and emotional support of the novelist Graham Greene. Though a late fiction writer, Spark began producing novels and stories at a rapid pace. In 1961 she wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, widely considered her masterpiece. The novel follows a teacher at a girls’ school who carefully and manipulatively cultivates the minds and morals of a select handful of promising pupils. In 1969, it was adapted into an Academy Award–winning film starring Maggie Smith and was a Royal Command Performance.

If years ago someone had said, your husband will do X, or your husband will say Y, what would I have done? First of all, and crucially: I wouldn’t have believed it. Second of all: If I had believed it, I would’ve changed paths—turned back to page 22, flipped ahead to page 41. If I’d been convinced, finally, of its truth, its inevitability, I would’ve chosen a different way.

I don’t believe in secrets or lies as “protection” because secrets rust. They make your chest cavity look like the hull of some ship at the bottom of the sea—eaten by salt, corroded. I’ll say that I believe in honesty as care. I’ll say that I know my children love me, and they love their father, and I hope they forgive us for all the things we are not, because what we are is human.

Today I think of myself as a ‘recovering pessimist.’ I know that optimism is not at odds with wisdom. It’s quite the opposite. I think of cynicism as cool but lazy, while hope is desperately uncool—it has sweaty palms and an earnest smile on its face. What I know to be true is that one hopeful person will accomplish more than a hundred cynics. Why? Because the hopeful person will try.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

Think of what you’ve achieved that didn’t seem possible last year, or five years ago, or ten; it didn’t seem possible then but you’ve proven that it was. Now imagine what might be possible in another year or five or ten. KEEP MOVING. Ask yourself what you would do if you had an unlimited supply of both courage and hope. Now begin answering that question with action. Take one step today—then repeat, repeat, repeat.

At our wedding, our college creative writing professor read a poem—John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage.” It’s a poem about imperfection, about being more together than we can be on our own: “Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean / into a strength. Two fallings become firm.” Being married isn’t being two columns, standing so straight and tall on their own, they never touch. Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.

it’s difficult to forgive someone who hasn’t expressed remorse. I could counter with questions: Why do I need to forgive someone who doesn’t seem to be sorry? What if forgiveness doesn’t need to be the goal? The goal is the wish: peace. Can there be peace without forgiveness? How do you heal when there is an open wound that is being kept open, a scab always being picked until it bleeds again? I could say this is my task: seeking peace, knowing the wound may never fully close—

William’s weekend with his friends, Geoffrey and Maggie, was turning out to be neither restful nor enjoyable. Things could have been worse, of course: there must be weekends during which the hosts’ house burns to the ground, one of the guests murders another, the hostess is arrested in extradition proceedings or the guests are all poisoned by the inclusion of death’s cap mushrooms in the stew. Such weekends must be very difficult indeed, not least because of the wording of the thank-you letters that one would have to write. The disaster, whatever it was, could hardly be ignored, but must be referred to tactfully in the letter, and always set in proper perspective. Thus, in the case of the mushroom poisoning, one would comment on how the other courses of the meal were delicious; in the case of the hostess’s arrest, one would say something comforting about the ability of defence lawyers in the jurisdiction to which she was being extradited—and so on, mutatis mutandis, trying at all times to be as positive as possible.

The spare Tynmore spinsters lay in their hard virginal bed. They groped for each other’s hands. “Did you hear it, Sister?” asked Miss Maggie. “Her time has come,” answered Miss Lizzie. “That’s why I didn’t marry Harvey—long ago when he asked me. I was afraid of that. So afraid.” “I don’t know,” Miss Lizzie said. “Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than just to be…safe.” She waited until the next scream died away. “At least she knows she’s living.” Miss Maggie had no answer. The

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was. Inside divorced me: married me, the me who loved my husband, the me who believed what we had was irrevocable and permanent, the me who believed in permanence. I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

Marriages are nesting dolls too. We carry each iteration. The marriage we had before the children. The marriage of love letters and late nights at dive bars and train rides through France. The marriage we had after the children. The marriage of tenderness but transactional communication. Who’s doing what and when and how. And early mornings and stroller walks and crayon on the walls and sunscreen that always needs to be reapplied. The marriage we had towards the end, before we knew there was an end. The marriage of the silent treatment and couch sleeping and the occasional update email. Somewhere at the centre is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there. But we’d have to open and open and open ourselves, our together selves, to find it. I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.

Back in counseling when we got home, the topic was our trip. His narrative: We had gone to the beach with our kids, and I never played in the waves. My perspective: Never was hyperbole. Rarely is true. What I said: “I didn’t want to be near him. I was too sad.” What I didn’t say: I thought about dying all the time. Or, not dying, but disappearing. Poof. I didn’t want to die, not really, but I wanted relief. I wanted to stop feeling what I was feeling. I carried all of that with me to the coast, and I didn’t know what to do with it there. The sticking point: I wrote poems at the ocean and didn’t play in the waves. The marriage counselor said, “It isn’t about the waves.” What I said: “He knows I’ve never liked being in the ocean much. Even before we had kids, I mostly sat in my beach chair and read or wrote.” What I didn’t say: The thing about the ocean is I don’t feel safe in it, because I can’t see what’s in there with me. I know I’m not alone in the water, but I don’t know what’s there.

Suggested Reading Atkinson, Kate. Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Binchy, Maeve. Tara Road, The Copper Beech, and Evening Class; Bloom, Amy. Come to Me; Edwards, Kim. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter; Ferris, Joshua. The Unnamed; Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl; Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections; Ganesan, Indira. Inheritance; Hanilton, Jane. Disobedience; Jonasson, Jonas. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared; Joyce, Rachel. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees; Mapson, Jo-Ann, The Owl & Moon Cafe; McEwan, Ian. Atonement; Miller, Arthur. All My Sons; Morrison, Toni. Love; O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night; Pekkanen, Sarah. The Opposite of Me; Porter, Andrew. In Between Days; Quindlen, Anna. Blessings and One True Thing; Rosenfeld, Lucinda. The Pretty One; Sittenfeld, Curtis. Sisterland; Smith, Ali. There But For The; Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club; Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; White, Karen. The Time Between; Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway; Yates, Richard. The Easter Parade.

For a second he thought she might chuckle, and honest to God he didn't know what he would do if she did. "Grey, society didn't give you that scar. A woman you treated with no more regard than your dirty stockings gave you that scar. You cannot blame the actions of one on so many." HIs fingers tightened into fists at his side. "I do not blame all of society for her actions, of course not." "How could you? You don't even know who it was, do you?" "No." But he had suspicions. He was almost completely certain it had been Maggie-Lady Devane. He'd broken her heart the worst of them all. "Of course you don't." Suddenly her eyes were very dark and hard. "I suspect it could be one of a large list of names, all women who you toyed with and cast aside." A heavy chill settled over Grey's chest at the note of censure, and disapproval in her tone. He had known this day would come, when she would see him for what he truly was. He just hadn't expected it quite so soon. "Yes," he whispered. "A long list indeed." "So it's no wonder you would rather avoid society. I would too if I had no idea who my enemies were. It's certainly preferable to apologizing to every conquest and hope that you got the right one." She didn't say it meanly, or even mockingly, but there was definitely an edge to her husky voice. "Is this what we've come to, Rose?" he demanded. "You've added your name to the list of the women I've wronged?" She laughed then, knocking him even more off guard. "Of course not. I knew what I was getting myself into when I hatched such a foolhardy plan. No, your conscience need not bear the weight of me, grey." When she moved to stand directly before him, just inches away, it was all he could do to stand his ground and not prove himself a coward. Her hand touched his face, the slick satin of her gloves soft against his cheek. "I wish you would stop living under all this regret and rejoin the world," she told him in a tone laden with sorrow. "You have so much to offer it. I'm sure society would agree with me if you took the chance." Before he could engineer a reply, there was another knock at the door. Rose dropped her hand just as her mother stuck her head into the room. "Ah, there you are. Good evening, Grey. Rose, Lord Archer is here." Rose smiled. "I'll be right there, Mama." When the door closed once more, she turned to Grey. "Let us put an end to this disagreeable conversation and put it in the past where it belongs. Friends?" Grey looked down at her hand, extended like a man's. He didn't want to take it. In fact, he wanted to tell her what she could do with her offer of friendship and barely veiled insults. He wanted to crush her against his chest and kiss her until her knees buckled and her superior attitude melted away to pleas of passion. That was what he wanted.

I came across the writings of the Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa. As a man, he was problematic. He drank too much, slept around, and didn’t live as we’d expect a great, wise teacher to live. But every teacher is human. Likewise, parents are not wise oracles—they’re just people trying to shepherd other people through the world. We may know the right path to take, but knowing the way and consistently walking it are two different things. Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect. Trungpa writes about torma and don. “Possession” is the closest translation for the Tibetan word don—a ghost that causes misfortune, anger, fear, sickness. When you have a don, you are the possession. The anger possesses—owns—you. Torma means “offering cake.” You offer the torma to your don. You feed the ghost that does you harm, “that which possesses you.” Giving it a little something sweet is a way of saying, Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand. When I read Trungpa, I thought about my own ghosts differently. Fear isn’t inside me, I’m inside it. Anger isn’t something I’m holding; it’s something that’s held me, possessed me. And being possessed is the opposite of being free.

The question I keep asking myself as I write this book, the question I keep insisting upon, is this: How can this story—this experience—be useful to anyone other than me? How can I make this material into a tool you can use? To talk back to myself: experience is instructive. People make connections on their own. When I make a metaphor, I offer the comparison, but the distance between vehicle and tenor is distance the reader must cross. I can’t carry you from one to the other. I can’t carry you from the nesting doll to the self, or from the boat to the life—you have to get yourself there. I need to trust that I can hand this to you, just as it is, and it will mean something to you. I need to trust that you’ll know what to do with it. Here, take it. Is this enough? This is my material.

Instead of staying overnight on that trip as planned, many of her friends went home, because it was easier to do the work themselves—finding the snacks, getting the gift, managing soccer—than to walk their husbands through doing it, or to deal with anxious calls or snarky texts. She came back from her trip and started to make a spreadsheet of all the tasks that were her responsibility in her marriage—all the things on her plate, big and small. It ended up growing into a massive spreadsheet, which she emailed to her husband as a way of opening up a conversation about the division of labor in their home. I can’t do that. It’s too late to do anything about the inequity in my now-kaput marriage. But I made the list of tasks anyway. I wanted to see in black and white what I’d been doing in the marriage. Reader, I was going to show you the list, but I decided against it. You don’t need the list. Looking at it, I thought, No wonder so many divorced men get remarried right away and so many divorced women stay on their own. I saw something I’m still trying to process: My life looked surprisingly like my mother’s. My mother didn’t go to college, married at twenty, and had me at twenty-four. I went to college and graduate school, published my first book and got married at twenty-eight (at which age she already had three children), and had my children in my thirties. Still, still, my life looked a lot like hers.

The best things to happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage.

He talked about secrets - their weight, their heft. He talked about carrying them affects your breathing, your speech, your movements. You have to remember who knows what. You have to remember which versions of the stories you've told, and to whom, and when. If you tell the truth, there's nothing to "keep straight," nothing to work at. The truth isn't easy, but it's simple.

The Red Key Tavern in Indianapolis, a dive bar where you could order a beer and a candy bar, and where Kurt Vonnegut was never a regular, though for years I believed that lore.

GOOD BONES Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

I Feel for You,” Chaka Khan “She’s a Bad Mama Jama,” Carl Carlton “Ring My Bell,” Anita Ward “More Bounce to the Ounce,” Zapp “Le Freak,” CHIC “Best of My Love,” The Emotions “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” The Gap Band “Forget Me Nots,” Patrice Rushen “I’m Coming Out,” Diana Ross “Let’s Groove,” Earth, Wind & Fire “Xanadu,” Olivia Newton-John “Night Fever,” Bee Gees “Love Rollercoaster,” Ohio Players “Get Down on It,” Kool & The Gang

Take a boxer and a punching bag. The boxer uses the punching bag to get stronger. But what does the punching bag get besides punched?” She nodded. “The boxer doesn’t have a relationship with the punching bag,” I said. I realized it as I said it: “We don’t have a relationship.” She nodded. “So how do you stop being the punching bag?

don’t know if I can believe that I chose my parents, but I know this: I’d choose them now, again and again.

I’ve tried to love them as if there is a right way. No, I’ve loved them without having to try at all, because I’m their mother, and the love is not work. Parenting is work: the cooking of meals, the washing of clothes, the tending of wounds, the taming of cowlicks, the helping with homework, the driving to soccer, the packing of lunches, the finding of missing things (water bottle lids, baseballs, library books, mittens), the consoling to sleep. The love? It’s not work.

The nost in nostalgia means “homecoming”; the algia means “pain.” Hundreds of years ago, nostalgia was a diagnosable medical condition. Johannes Hofer, a seventeenth-century Swiss physician, named the condition, which he identified in homesick soldiers. Symptoms of nostalgia among Swiss soldiers included melancholy, malnutrition, sleepiness, brain fever, and hallucinations.

am who I am, doing what I came to do.

Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done. Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened—if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely—it’s as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match. Sometimes I wonder: If there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have survived? I don’t know. That’s the truth.

Sometimes I’m tired of my multitudes.

The divorce is a continuation of the marriage. Something set in motion years ago that continues.

I want to forgive, but first I need to feel everything that stands between me and forgiveness

It’s okay to have feelings. You don’t have to laugh them off. You don’t have to turn everything painful that happens into a self-deprecating joke in which you and your suffering are the punchline. It’s okay to put away the sad trombone. It’s okay to show up as your whole self, to come as you are.

helping people metabolize their experiences. What happens if you don’t process what has happened to you, what you’ve done, what you didn’t do? It sits inside you. It can make you feel like you’re choking, like you can’t take a full breath.

… form is never more than an extension of content. —Robert Creeley

I’ve become a student of my own pain, my own grief and suffering. In this way, he has been my teacher? Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect. We all come into the world less than done, unfinished, our skulls still stitching themselves together. All wax and feathers, a mess of hope.

she talked about the contracts we have with others. In every relationship, she said, there are the things that connect us—things we have in common, things we like about each other. But the contract is like a secret handshake under the table. It’s subconscious. It often has to do with the wounds we carry with us from childhood, our attachments, our traumas, even the ones we haven’t articulated to ourselves.

The best predictor for future behavior is past behavior.

The thing about birds: If we knew nothing of jays or wrens or sparrows, we’d believe the trees were singing, as if each tree has its own song. The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful.

She said I was being haunted by the part of me who couldn’t set this down. I thought of the don. Caroline said what I was doing was like tugging on a rope: I pulled, and there was tension on the other side. The only way to stop the tug-of-war was to let go of the rope. I needed to put the rope down.

What’s with all the birds?” My answer, which was only part of the whole, was this: Birds are wild creatures we have access to no matter where we live. If you’re in a city or a suburb, you get the wilderness of birds.

We don’t speak vows to our children when they’re born. There’s no formal process by which we tether ourselves to them. The vows are unspoken, but they hover in the air around us, moving around and in and through everything we say and do. I will always be here for you.

Stop watching and watching and watching the rearview mirror. Keep your eyes on the road. See the landscape scroll by like a filmstrip, and don't miss a frame of it. KEEP MOVING.

Maggie told him about her own father and the importance of ‘the chair’; as the world of the aged shrinks, the items that remain within it take on greater and greater value. ‘The chair’ becomes the tiny territory from which what remains of our lives is viewed, an eyrie, a lonely crag… Smith gave her a quizzical look and said that he would not write that down but that it was very poetic. Third,