Fleishman Is in Trouble: A Novel

understanding that life is a cancer that metastasizes so slowly you only have a vague and intermittent sense of your dying? That the dying is happening slowly enough that you get used to it? Or maybe that wasn’t life. Maybe that was just middle age.

And in our laughter we heard our youth, and it is not not a dangerous thing to be at the doorstep to middle age and at an impasse in your life and to suddenly be hearing sounds from your youth.

He just wanted regular, silly things in life, like stability and emotional support and a low-grade contentedness. Why couldn’t he just have regular, silly things?

I would wonder, globally, how you could be so desperately unhappy when you were so essentially happy.

His only thoughts about the future were how he was going to make it up to these children that they’d had to live among such grueling animosity and unhappiness, all the fighting they’d heard, the times he yelled at them when he was angry at her,

a plain, nonspectacular person to love him back. He wanted someone to root for him. He wanted to be the star in the relationship, just this once.

If the months of a peaceful marriage-like existence made Toby worried that the inertia of these nearly fifteen years would make him want to try again, their twice-weekly mediation meetings cured him.

Nobody told you how important it would be to constantly appear stable while you were getting a divorce, because everything you said and did would be more meaningful and poignant than you’d intended. Standing alone in the middle of your office, staring into the middle distance, was not a sign of stability.

We watch ourselves and our spouses change, and the work is to constantly recall the reasons you did this in the first place. Why is that honorable, to live in service of a moment you have to constantly work so hard to remember?