Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control.

I do not know why she didn’t/couldn’t have children. I know that she adopted me because she wanted a friend (she had none), and because I was like a flare sent out into the world

wrote her in because I couldn’t bear to leave her out. I wrote her in because I really wished it had been that way. When you are a solitary child you find an imaginary friend.

Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin.

have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any choice.

When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

I had no understanding of family life. I had no idea that you could like your parents, or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.

she said – and I will never forget it: ‘When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.’

But there is something I know: ‘When I am with her I am happy. Just happy.’
She nodded. She seemed to understand and I thought, really, for that second, that she would change her mind, that we would talk, that we would be on the same side of the glass wall. I waited.
She said, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’