There's all kinds of love in the world, and not all of it looks like the stuff in greeting cards.
Jennifer WeinerAs the days piled up into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and fall slid into winter, I realized one of the great truths about tragedy: You can dream of disappearing. You can wish for oblivion, for endless sleep or the escape of fiction, of walking into a river with your pockets full of stones, of letting the dark water close over your head. But if you've got kids, the web of the world holds you close and wraps you tight and keeps you from falling no matter how badly you think you want to fall.
Jennifer WeinerMaybe it stems from my newspaper-reporting days, but I took notes the whole time - getting the call, how I felt. As soon as I put pen to paper, it became a story [Hunger Heart], not something happening to me but something I was recording.
Jennifer WeinerWhen I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me - white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I'll go and whom I'll meet inside.
Jennifer WeinerThis is the meanest thing anyoneโs ever done to me,โ I said, through my tear-clogged throat. โI want you to know that.โ But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew it wasnโt true. In the grand, historical scheme of things, my father leaving us was doubtlessly worse. Which is one of the many things that sucked about my father?? he forever robbed me of the possibility of telling another man, This is the worst thing thatโs ever happened to me, and meaning it.
Jennifer Weiner