Sublime

It never did to compare your wife and your mistress, because your wife always won, the way the classics were better, the way the jazz standards had nuances no other songs had. Still, those pop ditties of the moment could sometimes get stuck in Hood’s head. Sometimes they articulated a whole season of trouble at the office. Sometimes they articulate

I wondered aloud if Margaret might be experiencing a similar resurgence of grief for Paul as she faced her own mortality.

Only an attractive young woman would take for granted a stranger’s interest in the minutiae of her life.

When she compiled her findings, the central premise was at once simple and profound: we learn who we are only by living, and not before.

Modern memoir posits that the shaped presentation of one’s own life is of value to the disinterested reader only if it dramatizes and reflects sufficiently on the experience of “becoming”: undertakes to trace the internal movement away from the murk of being told who you are by the accident of circumstance toward the clarity that identifies accurat

It is this sympathy that creates a dynamic in writing, the one necessary to stimulate internal movement.