Your posture is so elegant, Pierre told his clients. You have electrifying eyes. There is a leading-man quality to your jaw.

Lee was surprised that a single decision which had appeared fine at the time (quitting accounting) could leave her jobless and single, sleeping in her high school bedroom; it seemed to her she should have at least received some type of warning, of bad outcomes ahead.

Joan enjoyed the conversation so much that when Tomoko eventually did leave, she didn’t feel lonely, as she had before—Joan was still alone, yes, but now she was a satisfied alone. Her isolation was bearable again, even pleasant, as if her time with Tomoko had set a luminous haze over the rest of the evening.

Joan wondered if there was a specific point in each young man’s life when he realized just how much had been tilted in his favor. When he looked at himself in the mirror and simply thought: Thank God. “It might sound naive,” Joan said, “but I really didn’t think this would happen. Bill’s been married so many times. I suppose I thought it would be o

It would be near impossible, she knew, to explain to these young, beautiful people how difficult it could be not to be lonely. Young people like Lee and Marc imagined loneliness as a consequence—something you did or didn’t do to end up on your own. There was truth to that; sometimes it really was the miserable who were alone and the deserving who w

“That’s nice,” Inez said. “To have graduated.” A stretch of drunken laughter erupted from the other end of the table. Inez blinked her big eyes, waiting for a response, and now Joan would have to think of something, and the conversation would continue like this, lobbing tedious little bombs back and forth indefinitely.

There had been times when she’d been tempted to gorge on beauty like this—if she happened to be in a particularly depressed period and found a coat or dress she liked, she’d had the urge to gobble up every version or color, to multiply her pleasure.

speak at all. It was fine. It flowed so easily. Sometimes there were people like this who might be a part of your life, who you wished could be a bigger part—but it wasn’t meant to be, and you had only that limited share.

“All mothers are difficult in their own fashion,”