Tom Lake: The Sunday Times bestseller - a BBC Radio 2 and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick

She wanted me to have everything I ever thought of wanting.

And then what? It would have been a different life, one that I will never be able to imagine.

She had been asleep all afternoon and I was sitting there turning hems because, unbelievably, people were bringing their sewing by, thinking it would give her something to do while she was dying. She wanted me to finish it.

This is an uncomfortable point on which I have meant to be evasive, but since I have lied I decide to let the lie stand. I have staked out a single day of privacy in the light of this merciless interrogation.

The beauty and the suffering are equally true.

Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life and she would never in a million years have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan, but as it turned out, it was all she wanted.

“No, really, I’m done.” They are reminding me of the years when they were small and it was just me in the house beneath all that snow and Joe was in the barn trying to fix a tractor he didn’t know how to fix, and I felt like the children would eat me. Nell was eating me, still at my breast, and the other two rushed to crawl in my lap whenever I sat

Publicity was the most acting I’d ever done in my life, and it did nothing to dissuade me from the idea that I was finished.

The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.

His interest in what we said made us interesting, covered up our deficits.