Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.
Meg WolitzerBut clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.
Meg WolitzerBeing a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star.
Meg WolitzerAnd didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.
Meg WolitzerBut it's never just been the journals that have made the difference, I don't think. It's also the way the students are with one another . . . the way they talk about books and authors and themselves. Not just their problems, but their passions too. The way they form a little society and discuss whatever matters to them. Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.
Meg Wolitzer