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

The beauty and the suffering are equally true.

feet cold. The expression came from a literal condition: every time I spoke her first line, which was nothing more than the single word No! all the blood in my body surged to my heart in an act of self-preservation. My heart needed the blood in order to survive, and so my bloodless extremities were left to freeze.

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.

Duke had been right, the place had a peace that made a person want to stay. I had never thought about a cemetery that way before, and it helped me.

How could he have stood all that tennis? It was hot and I wanted to swim too, but like Pallace, it never occurred to me that we could have just gone without them. If our boyfriends played tennis then we would sit at the edge of the court and watch them

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.

Or maybe they are children looking at their parents and so our lives began when they began and everything else they colored in with fat crayons any way they wanted.

We should have one night that is not about the future or the past, one night to celebrate these two people and nothing else but we’ve blown it. “You don’t want children?” I ask her.

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.