I wish there were a class where we could just keep going around the circle. around and around, until we had finally said everything about ourselves.

I could not make a move without making love.

I went to the bedroom and lay on the floor, so as not to mess up the covers.

Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful, except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be.

After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time-about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.

I think it's more interesting if you go all the way with the world you have, and really look at it, and push it to an even more extreme extreme.

I nodded, pretending I was relaxed. I watched the sunlight sparkling on the water and practiced mind-body integration for a few seconds by quietly hyperventilating.