Sublime

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

He has always been alien to her, a man of procedures where there should be passions.

the four branches of the trauma tree: (1) addiction, not only to vices such as drugs, alcohol, and gambling, but also to socially acceptable things such as work, exercise, and perfectionism (check); (2) codependency, or excessive psychological reliance on another person; (3) habituated survival strategies, such as a propensity to anger and rage

She’d become worried that it was her father’s attention that kept her intact, kept her Sylvie, and she felt great sympathy now for her brother-in-law. Sylvie had been feeling this way for only a month, and it was terrible. The size of this manuscript, and the effort in its pages, showed that William had been in this place for a long time.

Sophia, Lukas, and Stella, along with my wife, Jennifer, have for many years put up with a level of madness, mania, and interference on my part that no one should ever have to deal with. I can only hope that your certain knowledge that my love for all of you is constant and unbounded is somehow mitigating. It’s been a lot of fun so far. For me,

The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of.

A couple of months ago, he told me that if he died before he finished it, he wanted me to delete the text from his computer. Just wipe it out and forget it, he said, it’s of no importance. So you erased it? Of course I did. It’s a sin to disobey a person’s dying wish. Good, I thought to myself. Good that this woman won’t have to set eyes on