Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.

Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

The secret is that there is no secret.

...hoarders of guilty secrets are inevitably consumed with appearances.

I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.

But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.