Games and Rituals

It wasn’t accurate to say she lost weight—it was more like she chased the weight off her body the way a farmer would chase a stray dog off his property. And like a suspicious farmer, Fawn still patrols the borders of her body, a shotgun propped in the crook of her elbow, ready to shoot any fattening food that tries to sneak back in.

Finally, Joel speaks. “How are your parents?” “Oh, well, they’re moving,” Fawn says. “You know. To a retirement community. It’s an adjustment. In lots of ways. Good and bad.” She keeps adding phrases, hoping they will add up to a reasonable conversation.

In twenty years, Joel has never been able to figure out why Fawn had liked him when she was overweight and awkward, and why she dislikes him now that she’s slender and pretty. He doesn’t seem to understand everyone has standards—some people just hardly ever get to apply theirs.

What happened last time! Is there a worse phrase in the English language? Well, maybe. The bank is foreclosing isn’t great, and North Korea just launched a missile is pretty awful. But what happened last time is the worst because it almost always refers to an event of which the participants have wildly differing interpretations.

To Michelle Kane. I can never thank you enough for introducing me to the term “refresh blister” and for caring as much about this book as I do.

She ate one meal a day, at lunchtime—ham-and-cheese roll-ups drizzled with honey. Otherwise, she drank can after can of Diet Coke in the morning, and then about midafternoon she switched to mango margaritas, and the margaritas saw her out. She said this was pandemic behavior, but the only kitchen equipment she brought with her when she moved in was

She said the wedding photography was strictly temporary, but Oscar wondered. He thought maybe wedding photography was like organized crime, or tax evasion, or adultery—you got into it without really meaning to and the rewards were so great you stayed and the years rolled by and suddenly, there you were, not the person you’d intended to be at all. (

But in my experience, people who ask you what your novel is about really want you to say something like “It’s about a young woman experiencing independence for the first time,” so they can say, “Hasn’t that been done to death?” (It was actually only one person who’d said that to me—a man I sat next to on a flight home to see my parents—but I felt h

Not handsome, exactly—in fact, he teetered on the edge of ugly: short and slightly stocky, with thinning black hair. But his skin was deeply tanned, as though he flew to the Mediterranean instead of the endless Minneapolis-Detroit-Chicago route, and his thick lips were sensual, his teeth startling white. He exuded a vitality and alertness that was