Paula Hawkins Quotes

Hollowness: that I understand. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps

I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.

There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home.

I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.

it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.

The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.

There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion.

Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis. (This is a reference to an E.E. Cummings poem within the author's work)

When did you become so weak?” I don’t know. I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it.

I want to drag knives over my skin, just to feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough for that

But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them.

let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers.

I can’t do this, I can’t just be a wife. I don’t understand how anyone does it—there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that or look around for something to distract you.

I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it.

And I’ve just got to let myself feel the pain, because if I don’t, if I keep numbing it, it’ll never really go away.

A tiding of magpies: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told

It's impossible to resist the kindness of strangers.

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts. Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all.

Sometimes I catch myself trying to remember the last time I had meaningful physical contact with another person, just a hug or a heartfelt squeeze of my hand, and my heart twitches.

I have to find a way of making myself happy, I have to stop looking for happiness elsewhere. It’s true,

But then I think, this happens sometimes, doesn’t it? People you have a history with, they won’t let you go, and as hard as you might try, you can’t disentangle yourself, can’t set yourself free. Maybe after a while you just stop trying.

I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s not just that I’ve put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move.

It’s ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn?

He’s a master at it, making me feel as though everything is my fault, making me feel worthless.

It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness.

it’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move.

They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be.

The things I want to remember I can't, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming.

Beautiful sunshine, cloudless skies, no one to play with, nothing to do. Living like this, the way I’m living at the moment, is harder in the summer when there is so much daylight, so little cover of darkness, when everyone is out and about, being flagrantly, aggressively happy. It’s exhausting, and it makes you feel bad if you’re not joining in.

She felt it when she woke, not a presence but an absence.

He never understood that it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.

It broke me and I broke us.

It’s not even rejection, it’s dismissal.

It feels like coming home - not just to any home, but a childhood home, a place left behind a lifetime ago; it's the familiarity of walking up stairs and knowing exactly which one is going to creak.

I’ve been the fool. If he does it with you, he’ll do it to you.

How much better life must have been for jealous drunks before emails and texts and mobile phones, before all this electronica and the traces it leaves.

I’d never realized, not until the last year or two of my life, how shaming it is to be pitied.

Who's to say that once I run, I'll find that isn't enough? Who's to say I won't end up feeling exactly the way I do right now-not safe, but stifled? Maybe I'll want to run again, and again, and eventually I'll end up back on those old tracks, because there's nowhere left to go. Maybe. Maybe not. You have to take the risk, don't you

So who do I want to be tomorrow?

No matter how much I love him, it won't be enough.

Being the other woman is a huge turn-on, there’s no point denying it: you’re the one he can’t help but betray his wife for, even though he loves her. That’s just how irresistible you are.

Sometimes, I don’t want to go anywhere, I think I’ll be happy if I never have to set foot outside the house again.

Nobody warned me it would break us. But it did. Or rather, it broke me, and then I broke us.

I feel a rush of gratitude so strong, it feels almost like love.

You’re like one of those dogs, the unwanted ones that have been mistreated all their lives. You can kick them and kick them, but they’ll still come back to you, cringing and wagging their tails. Begging. Hoping that this time it’ll be different, that this time they’ll do something right and you’ll love them.

Yes, it is. It’s, like, when someone has an affair, why does the wife always hate the other woman? Why doesn’t she hate her husband? He’s the one who’s betrayed her, he’s the one who swore to love her and keep her and whatever forever and ever. Why isn’t he the one who gets shoved off a fucking cliff?

Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis.

I might never have the courage to say the words out loud, I might lose them altogether, they might stick in my throat and choke me in my sleep.

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl . . . Three for a girl. I’m stuck on three, I just can’t get any further. My head is thick with sounds, my mouth thick with blood. Three for a girl. I can hear the magpies—they’re laughing, mocking me, a raucous cackling. A tiding. Bad tidings. I can see them now, black against the sun. Not the birds, something else. Someone’s coming. Someone is speaking to me. Now look. Now look what you made me do.

I don’t know. I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it.

He doesn’t know how determined I can be. Once I’ve made my mind up, I’m a force to be reckoned with.

the sense of shame I feel about an incident is proportionate not just to the gravity of the situation, but also to the number of people who witnessed it.

He lies to himself the way he lies to me. He believes this. He actually believes that he was good to me.

here will be no closure, no resolution. I lie awake thinking about it and I ache. There can be no greater agony, nothing can be more painful than the not knowing, which will never end.

A familiar ache fills my chest. I have felt this way before. On a larger scale, to a more intense degree, of course, but I remember the quality of the pain. You don’t forget it.

I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction.

I wake abruptly, my breath jagged and heart racing, my mouth stale, and I know immediately that's it. I'm awake. The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.

She had never realized before her life was torn apart how awkward grief was, how inconvenient for everyone with whom the mourner came into contact. At first it was acknowledged and respected and deferred to. But after a while it got in the way—of conversation, of laughter, of normal life.

No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.

The horrors conjured up by the mind are always so much worse than what is.

He loves me so much, it makes me ache. I don’t know how he does it. I would drive me mad.

We tell our stories differently, don't we, you and I?

Imagine walking past the place where you lost someone, every single day.

Anything was possible. When you hear hooves you look for horses, but you can’t discount zebras.

You’re not some grieving, lost child any longer. You’re a completely different person. You’re stronger. You’re an adult now. You don’t have to be afraid of being alone. It’s not the worst thing, is it?

لا يمكن أن يوجد عذاب أكبر، أو شيء أكثر إيلاماً، من عدم المعرفة

Sometimes I feel like seeing if I can track down anybody from the old days , but then I think, what would I talk to them about now?

Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all.

Usually, I would pretend to be nice, but this morning I feel real, like myself. I feel high, almost like I’m tripping, and I couldn’t fake nice if I tried.

I know is, one minute I’m ticking along fine and life is sweet and I want for nothing, and the next I can’t wait to get away, I’m all over the place, slipping and sliding again.

The memory doesn’t fit with the reality, because I don’t remember anger, raging fury. I remember fear.

Maybe the courage I need has nothing to do with telling the truth and everything to do with walking away.

There was a time when I thought he could be everything, he could be enough. I thought that for years. I loved him completely. I still do. But I don’t want this any longer.

Lena's voice grew cold. "I don't understand you. I don't understand people like you, who always choose to blame the woman. If there's two people doing something wrong and one of them's a girl, it's got to be her fault, right?

She must be very secure in herself, I suppose, in them, for it not to bother her, to walk where another woman has walked before. She obviously doesn’t think of me as a threat. I think about Ted Hughes, moving Assia Wevill into the home he’d shared with Plath, of her wearing Sylvia’s clothes, brushing her hair with the same brush. I want to ring Anna up and remind her that Assia ended up with her head in the oven, just like Sylvia did.

The river can go back over the past and bring it all up and spit it out on the banks in full view of everyone, but people can’t.

some battles aren’t worth fighting.

She's cuckoo, laying her egg in my nest.

I’m not normal.

know what it is to love someone and to say the most terrible things to them, in anger or anguish.

أحس أنني صرت أخف ، أكثر حرية ، لكن أكثر حزنًا أيضًا

ليس عليّ إلا أن أترك نفسي أحس هذا الألم، لأنني إذا لم أفعل ذلك ... إذا بقيت أخدّر الألم ... فلن يزول مني أبداً

The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps.

I felt isolated in my misery. I became lonely, so I drank a bit, and then a bit more, and then I became lonelier, because no one likes being around a drunk. I lost and I drank and I drank and I lost.

What does it feel like, Anna, to live in my house, surrounded by the furniture I bought, to sleep in the bed that I shared with him for years, to feed your child at the kitchen table he fucked me on?

I sit there on the floor with the picture in front of me and think about how things get broken all the time by accident, and how sometimes you just don't get round to getting them fixed.

I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept in days. I hate this, hate insomnia more than anything, just lying there, brain going round, tick, tick, tick, tick. I itch all over. I want to shave my head.

Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.

The last thing I need is rest.

I am not a model wife. I can’t be. No matter how much I love him, it won’t be enough.

It isn’t normal to invade someone’s privacy to that degree. It’s what is often seen as a form of emotional abuse.

Everything is material. And comedy equals tragedy plus time. Isn’t that how it goes?

the job itself is utterly beneath me, but then I seem to have become beneath me over the past year or two. I need to reset the scale.

You stung me like that often; cruelty always was your strong suit.

Drunk Rachel sees no consequences, she is either excessively expansive and optimistic or wrapped up in hate. She has no past, no future. She exists purely in the moment.

I am no longer just a girl on the train, going back and forth without point or purpose.

لا أفهم أبدًا كيف يستطيع الناس التغاضي بلا مبالاة عن الأذى الذي يتسبّبون به عندما يتبعون قلوبهم.

I want to drag knives over my skin, just so that I can feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough to do that.

Let's be honest: women are still only really valued for two things--their looks and their role as mothers. I'm not beautiful, and I can't have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless.

You were never the princess, you were never the passive beauty waiting for a prince, you were something else. You sided with darkness, with the wicked stepmother, the bad fairy, the witch.

I don’t believe in soul mates, but there’s an understanding between us that I just haven’t felt before, or at least, not for a long time. It comes from shared experience, from knowing how it feels to be broken. Hollowness: that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.

I’m going to tell the truth. No more lies, no more hiding, no more running, no more bullshit. I’m going to put everything out in the open, and then we’ll see. If he can’t love me then, so be it.

failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under and I gave up hope.

The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.

but I remember the quality of the pain. You don’t forget it.

There can be no greater agony, nothing can be more painful than the not knowing, which will never end.

That's my fault, of course, because I behaved stupidly, like a child, because I didn't like feeling rejected. I need to learn to lose a little better.

Every time I hear footsteps on the steps, my heart rate goes up. Every time I hear the clacking of high heels, I am seized with trepidation.

Parents don't care anything but their children. They are the centre of the universe; they are all that really counts. Nobody else is important, no one else's suffering or joy matters, none of it is real.

As histórias dos adultos eram cheias de crueldades idiotas: criancinhas impedidas de entrar na escola porque tinham a cor de pele errada, gente surrada ou morta por adorar o deus errado.

Watching someone in the throes of raw grief is a terrible thing; the act of watching feels violent, intrusive, a violation. Yet we do it, we have to do it, all the time; you just have to learn to cope with it whatever way you can.

Cathy's a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her niceness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged, often, daily almost, which can be tiring.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

Some say the women left something of themselves in the water; some say it retains some of their power, for ever since then it has drawn to its shores the unlucky, the desperate, the unhappy, the lost. They come here to swim with their sisters.

Angela was a vandal when it came to books: a cracker of spines, a dog-earer of pages, a scribbler in margins.

They never saw what the water really was, greenish-black and filled with living things and dying things.

...the past shooting out at me like sparrows for the hedgerow, startling and inescapable.

I just don't know whether he's the condemned man or the executioner.

أحيانًا، يغامر المرء بأي شيءٍ ليكسب راحته.

I’m not even that upset about the rejection any more. What bothers me most is that I haven’t got to the end of my story, and I can’t start over with someone else, it’s too hard.

What if the thing I’m looking for can never be found? What if it just isn’t possible?

If he thinks I’m going to sit around crying over him, he’s got another thing coming. I can live without him, I can do without him just fine—but I don’t like to lose. It’s not like me. None of this is like me. I don’t get rejected. I’m the one who walks away.

I thought how odd it was that parents believe they know their children, understand their children. Do they not remember what it was like to be eighteen, or fifteen, or twelve? Perhaps having children makes you forget being one.

I don't believe in soul mates, but there's an understanding between us that I just haven't felt before, or at least, not for a long time. It comes from shared experience, knowing how it feels to be broken.

She used to think that only parents can understand the sort of love that swallows you up, but now she wondered whether it was only mothers who did.

What bothers me most is that I haven’t got to the end of my story, and I can’t start over with someone else, it’s too hard.

I know that I’m going to be better, that I’m going to be happy. It won’t be long.

one minute I’m ticking along fine and life is sweet and I want for nothing, and the next, I can’t wait to get away, I’m all over the place, slipping and sliding again.

I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable.

Nunca le envidiaré su felicidad, sólo desearía que pudiéramos disfrutarla juntos.

Life and light will not let me be.

no one told you how slow you would become, and how bored you would be by your slowness.

That we were all so happy. It seems unimaginable. All that happiness, wrecked.

Lo único que sé es que, un minuto estoy bien y la vida es dulce y no echo nada en falta y, al siguiente, me disperso, comienzo a desbarrar y otra vez me muero por escaparme.

I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she'd just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and thought, I'm not that bad. This is where the bar is set.

She’s buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks, her grave marked with a cairn. Not more than a little pile of stones, really. I didn’t want to draw attention to her resting place, but I couldn’t leave her without remembrance. She’ll sleep peacefully there, no one to disturb her, no sounds but birdsong and the rumble of passing trains.

I’ve always thought that it might be fun to be Catholic, to be able to go to the confessional and unburden yourself and have someone tell you that they forgive you, to take all the sin away, wipe the slate clean.

She has her fingers curled tightly around his forefinger and I have hold of her perfect pink foot, and I feel as though fireworks are going off in my chest. It’s impossible, this much love.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. —Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

But then I suppose I’ve never really lost anyone. How would I know what that kind of grief feels like?

I am no longer just a girl on the train,

You can’t step directly into a cold stream of water, it’s too shocking, too brutal, but if you get there gradually, you hardly notice it; it’s like boiling a frog in reverse.

They’re a match, they’re a set. They’re happy, I can tell. They’re what I used to be, they’re Tom and me five years ago. They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be.

I feel about an incident is proportionate not just to the gravity of the situation, but also to the number of people who have witnessed it.

I’m still holding back, because obviously I can’t say everything I’m feeling. I know that’s the point of therapy, but I just can’t. I have to keep things vague,

He might be a very good liar, but I know when he’s telling the truth. He doesn't fool me.

When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I dreamed I wanted, the things I had and threw away.

I’m starting to see what he must have seen in her. What he must have loved.

Cathy's a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her kindness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged.

She exists purely in the moment.

The thing about being barren is that you're not allowed to get away from it.

It could be her birthday, it could be the morning of the Rapture—Cathy will get up early on Saturday to clean.

I can't help the way I am. "You can help what you do, though." That's what Kamal says.

The things I want to remember I can’t, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming.

Kindness was her new project. She hoped it might be gentler on the soul than anger.

I'm good enough to make him believe that it's all about him.

That seemed a stupid reason, but adult stories were full of stupid cruelties:

I forgot to feel what I was supposed to be feeling...

Accidents do happen, and they especially happen to drunks, but mother and son, eight weeks apart? In fiction, that would never stand.

To have my hopes raised and dashed again, it's like cold steel twisting in my gut.

I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts. Who

At night I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a whisper in my head, Slip away. When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I had and threw away. I can't get comfortable, because every way I turn I run into dead ends.

Let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers. I'm not beautiful, and I can't have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless.

Sometimes I want to scream at him, Just let me go. Let me go. Let me breathe. So I can't sleep, and I'm angry. I feel as though we're having fight already, even though the fight's only in my imagination. And in my head, thoughts go round and round and round. And I feel like I'm suffocating.

And they are a partnership. I can see it, I know how they are. His strength, that protectiveness he radiates, it doesn’t mean she’s weak. She’s strong in other ways; she makes intellectual leaps that leave him openmouthed in admiration. She can cut to the nub of a problem, dissect and analyse it in the time it takes other people to say good morning. At parties, he often holds her hand, even though they’ve been together years. They respect each other, they don’t put each other down.

Parents don't care about anything but their children. They are the centre of the universe; they are all that really counts. Nobody else is important, no one else's suffering or joy matters, none of it is real.

The windows of number fifteen, reflecting morning sunshine, look like sightless eyes.

عندما أعقد العزم على أمرٍ ما أصبح قوة لا يمكن تجاهلها.

In between them stood an elephant and she felt she ought to point it out.

البوح ليس سهلا

...the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.

On the way back down the road, he passes me in his car, our eyes meet for just a second and he smiles at me.

I'm well aware that there is no job more important than that of raising a child, but the problem is that it isn't valued.

We. Us. Our little family. With our problems and our routines. Fucking bitch. She’s a cuckoo, laying her egg in my nest. She has taken everything from me. She has taken everything and now she calls me to tell me that my distress is inconvenient for her?

If I sit in carriage D, which I usually do, and the train stops at this signal, which it almost always does, I have a perfect view into my favourite trackside house: number fifteen.

I liked my job, but I didn’t have a glittering career, and even if I had, let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers. I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless.

I’m a good liar,” he told me once with a grin. Once, he said, “Even if she did check, the thing with Rachel is, she won’t remember what happened tomorrow anyway.” That’s when I started to realize just how bad things were for him. It

I want to call her back and ask her, What does it feel like, Anna, to live in my house, surrounded by the furniture I bought, to sleep in the bed that I shared with him for years, to feed your child at the kitchen table he fucked me on?

I felt guilty. Stupid, I know, but I thought about Scott—about what we did and how it felt—and I wished I hadn’t done it, because it felt like a betrayal. Of Tom. The man who left me for another woman two years ago. I can’t help how I feel.

On the train, the tears come, and I don’t care if people are watching me; for all they know, my dog might have been run over. I might have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I might be a barren, divorced, soon-to-be-homeless alcoholic.

But I have to do something, and at least this feels like action. All those plans I had—photography courses and cookery classes—when it comes down to it, they feel a bit pointless, as if I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it. I need to find something that I must do, something undeniable. I can’t do this, I can’t just be a wife. I don’t understand how anyone does it—there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that or look around for something to distract you.

All this guilt, this doubt, it was corrosive. It was changing her, twisting her. She was not the woman she used to be. She could feel herself slipping, slithering as though she were shedding a skin, and she didn’t like the rawness underneath, she didn’t like the smell of it. It made her feel vulnerable, it made her feel afraid.

It doesn’t feel like it was me who was doing that thing. And it’s so hard to feel responsible for something you don’t remember. So I never feel bad enough. I feel bad, but the thing that I’ve done—it’s removed from me. It’s like it doesn’t belong to me.

The clouds that menaced this morning did so all day, growing heavier and blacker until they burst, monsoon-like, this evening, just as office workers stepped outside and the rush hour began in earnest, leaving the roads gridlocked and tube station entrances choked with people opening and closing umbrellas.

In no time at all, I find myself crying again. It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness. I confide in him and I forget, once again, what I’m doing here. I don’t watch his face for a reaction, I don’t study his eyes for some sign of guilt or suspicion. I let him comfort me.

He’ll be so happy. He’ll be mental with joy when I tell him. The thought that she might not be his won’t even cross his mind. Telling him would be cruel, it would break his heart, and I don’t want to hurt him. I’ve never wanted to hurt him. I can’t help the way I am.

Art is legacy, it is solace. It soothes, consoles, arouses. It’s work. It’s what you do all day. It’s how you work things out, how you understand the world. It’s the opportunity to start over, to shed your skin, to take revenge, to fall in love. To be good. To live long.

Miriam had lost the talent for friendship when she was young, and once gone, it was a difficult thing to recover. Like loneliness, the absence of friendship was self-perpetuating: the harder you tried to make people like you, the less likely they were to do so; most people recognized right away that something was off, and they shied away.

There is a pile of clothing on the side of the train tracks. Light-blue cloth—a shirt, perhaps—jumbled up with something dirty white. It’s probably rubbish, part of a load dumped into the scrubby little wood up the bank. It could have been left behind by the engineers who work this part of the track, they’re here often enough. Or it could be something else. My mother used to tell me that I had an overactive imagination; Tom said that, too. I can’t help it, I catch sight of these discarded scraps, a dirty T-shirt or a lonesome shoe, and all I can think of is the other shoe and the feet that fitted into them.

I miss being a mistress. I enjoyed it. I loved it, in fact. I never felt guilty. I pretended I did. I had to, with my married girlfriends, the ones who live in terror of the pert au pair or the pretty, funny girl in the office who can talk about football and spends half her life in the gym. I had to tell them that of course I felt terrible about it, of course I felt bad for his wife, I never meant for any of this to happen, we fell in love, what could we do?

Cathy gets up early to clean the house every Saturday, no matter what. It could be her birthday, it could be the morning of the Rapture—Cathy will get up early on Saturday to clean. She says it’s cathartic, it sets her up for a good weekend, and because she cleans the house aerobically, it means she doesn’t have to go to the gym.

He lied all the time, about everything. Even when he didn't need to, even when there was no point. ... Tom's whole life was constructed on lies — falsehoods and half-truths told to make him look better, stronger, more interesting than he was. And I bought them. I fell for them all. ... I wonder whether [I] would have loved the weaker, flawed, unembellished version. I think I would. I would have forgiven his mistakes and his failures. I have committed enough of my own.

There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial primal sense of where it flows. I believe that I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water. This is the place where I learned to swim, the place where I learned to inhabit nature and my body in the most joyous and pleasurable way.

I can't blame this all for my drinking -- I can't blame my parents or my childhood, and abusive uncle or some terrible tragedy. It's my fault. I was a drinker anyway -- I've always liked to drink. But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. And then I went from being a drinker to being a drunk, and there's nothing more boring than that.

So, how do we take responsibility? You can apologize—and even if you cannot remember committing your transgression, that doesn’t mean that your apology, and the sentiment behind your apology, is not sincere.” “But I want to feel it. I want to feel . . . worse.” It’s an odd thing to say, but I think this all the time. I don’t feel bad enough. I know what I’m responsible for, I know all the terrible things I’ve done, even if I don’t remember the details—but I feel distanced from those actions. I feel them at one remove.

I thought rape was something a bad man did to you, a man who jumped out at you in an alleyway in the dead of night, a man who held a knife to your throat. I didn't think boys did it. Not schoolboys like Robbie, not good-looking boys, the ones who go out with the prettiest girls in town. I didn't think they did it to you in your own living room, I didn't think they talked to you about it afterwards and asked you if you'd had a good time. I just thought I must have done something wrong, that I hadn't made it clear enough that I didn't want it.

The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties. My friends were having children, friends of friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were everywhere. I was asked about it all the time. My mother, our friends, colleagues at work. When was it going to be my turn? At some point our childlessness became an acceptable topic of Sunday-lunch conversation, not just between Tom and me, but more generally. What we were trying, what we should be doing, do you really think you should be having a second glass of wine? I was still young, there was still plenty of time, but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under, and I gave up hope. At the time, I resented the fact that it was always seen as my fault, that I was the one letting the side down. But as the speed with which he managed to impregnate Anna demonstrates, there was never any problem with Tom’s virility. I was wrong to suggest that we should share the blame; it was all down to me. Lara, my best friend since university, had two children in two years: a boy first and then a girl. I didn’t like them. I didn’t want to hear anything about them. I didn’t want to be near them. Lara stopped speaking to me after a while. There was a girl at work who told me—casually, as though she were talking about an appendectomy or a wisdom-tooth extraction—that she’d recently had an abortion, a medical one, and it was so much less traumatic than the surgical one she’d had when she was at university. I couldn’t speak to her after that, I could barely look at her. Things became awkward in the office; people noticed. Tom didn’t feel the way I did. It wasn’t his failure, for starters, and in any case, he didn’t need a child like I did. He wanted to be a dad, he really did—I’m sure he daydreamed about kicking a football around in the garden with his son, or carrying his daughter on his shoulders in the park. But he thought our lives could be great without children, too. “We’re happy,” he used to say to me. “Why can’t we just go on being happy?” He became frustrated with me. He never understood that it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.

I can’t blame all this for my drinking—I can’t blame my parents or my childhood, an abusive uncle or some terrible tragedy. It’s my fault. I was a drinker anyway—I’ve always liked to drink. But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them. And then I went from being a drinker to being a drunk, and there’s nothing more boring than that. I’m better now, about the children thing; I’ve got better since I’ve been on my own. I’ve had to. I’ve read books and articles, I’ve realized that I must come to terms with it. There are strategies, there is hope. If I straightened myself out and sobered up, there’s a possibility that I could adopt. And I’m not thirty-four yet—it isn’t over. I am better than I was a few years ago, when I used to abandon my trolley and leave the supermarket if the place was packed with mums and kids; I wouldn’t have been able to come to a park like this, to sit near the playground and watch chubby toddlers rolling down the slide. There were times, at my lowest, when the hunger was at its worst, when I thought I was going to lose my mind.

I miss being a mistress. I enjoyed it. I loved it, in fact. I never felt guilty. I pretended I did. I had to, with my married girlfriends, the ones who live in terror of the pert au pair or the pretty, funny girl in the office who can talk about football and spends half her life in the gym. I had to tell them that of course I felt terrible about it, of course I felt bad for his wife, I never meant for any of this to happen, we fell in love, what could we do? The truth is, I never felt bad for Rachel.... She just wasn’t real to me, and anyway, I was enjoying myself too much. Being the other woman is a huge turn-on, there’s no point denying it: you’re the one he can’t help but betray his wife for, even though he loves her. That’s just how irresistible you are.