[...] I have notice the couples most interested in the grand tour of my tragedy are often in couples therapy. They are often in that phase where they hire a babysitter once a week so that they can sit across from each other at a restaurant and distract themselves from the vast distance, the dullness, that has risen up between them with the bustle of menus and waiters. [...]

[...] it seemed to some as if I were getting away with something, as if I were not paying the usual price, and if the usual price was take-out Thai food and a video with your husband on a Saturday night then I was not, in fact, paying that price. [...] And I imagine if you are feeling restless or thwarted in your marriage, if you have created an orderly warm home for your child at a certain slight cost to your own freedom or momentum, you might look at me, or someone else like me, an think that I am not making the usual sacrifices. [...]

[...] The secret suspicion that you might be a hack, a glorified hack, making a rather nice living doing something fun but not truly living out your fantasy of creating art the way you honestly thought you would be in college, well, the check you make out to that fancy, creative, open place you are sending your child to is eloquently arguing otherwise.

[...] Before going to bed he howls like a wolf, then says, "I am a wolf," then says, "Where is my bottle? Where is my mango? Where is my ketchup?" then very deliberately climbs out of his bed and walks through the dark halls saying, "I am lost, Mama, I am lost." [...]

[...] Part of what seems threatening or unsettling about the single mother's household is precisely the sense that the mother may be glimpsed as more of a person, that these children are witnessing a struggle they should not be seeing, that their mother is very early on a regular, complicated person, rather than simply an adult who is part of the opaque, semi-separate adult culture of the house.

[...] Wallace goes on to attack Updike and, in passing, Roth and Mailer for being narcissists. But does this mean that the new generation of novelists is not narcissistic? I would suspect, narcissism being about as common among male novelists as brown eyes in the general public, that it does not. It means that we are simply witnessing the flowering of a new narcissism: boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in [...] the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world.

[...] There is no poetry, no glory, in this story, no secret communion, no mystical collaboration, no intangible collusion, between father and daughter, only pointless, run-of-the-mill human suffering. Instead of the subtle literary pas de deux between Joyce and his daughter, the truth is more painful and nonsensical: a woman's life was wasted. [...]

We have come to expect psychological lightning from the books we read on beaches and buses and trains. We want motives, symptoms, childhood traumas. We want years on the analyst's couch condensed into a single paragraph. We want the deep pleasure of what reviewers call "penetrating psychological insight," but we don't, it would appear, want to work too hard for it. Novels like Smiley's offer the perfect solution--the therapeutic thrill of delving into the past combined with the convenience of pre-packaged interpretation: one overarching explanation for everything that's gone wrong. Such books operate on the idea, borrowed from talk shows, that the complexity of human character must be presented, analyzed, and solved in the space of one hour, not including commercials.

[...] Didion uses ironic, or what could be more accurately called skeptical, quotation marks fanatically and constantly. They highlight the fact that the journalist is not just telling a story, she is taking it apart; that the words we use are suspect, revelatory.

[...] After the famous first line of her collection The White Album, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," [...]