Three Women: THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

So many of the fears about desire seem to be things we should have overcome years ago. We can say we want to fuck indiscriminately, but we cannot exactly say that we expect to be happy.

She wanted a partner. That word meant nothing, it seemed, to anyone she knew.

Indeed it is the same world that wants to keep lauding only those who have already been lauded, those who have, throughout history, been accepted.

Mostly, Sloane could not tell Jenny her own pain, because it was smaller than Jenny’s pain, and Jenny was not responsible for Sloane’s pain in the way that Sloane was responsible for Jenny’s.

What the fuck do you know about young women, Maggie thinks. We don’t remember what we want to remember. We remember what we can’t forget.

She felt it in the way she’d been raised, as though two separate lines streamed into her, never having crossed, so that she herself was two unmixed people.

At the same time that she was grateful her secret was safe, she couldn’t understand why nobody confronted her.

It had been on Sloane, as a woman, to make sure the other woman was in the fold.

The gate that guards the reality of one’s childhood is high and existentially heavy, and merely opening it takes more energy than one expects.