The Margot Affair: A Novel

The chaos of our daughter, so lovely and beautiful, I would always be grateful for it, how she required us to keep living, to keep moving forward, just so she didn’t leave us in her dust. I

The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that leans always to the left. Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I’d been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because

Après des années de fêtes, de voyages, d’excentricités et d’extravagante gaîté, je me voyais mal expliquer à mon fils que tout était terminé, que désormais, nous irions tous les jours contempler sa mère délirer dans une chambre d’hôpital, que sa Maman était une malade mentale et qu’il fallait attendre sagement de la voir sombrer. Je lui avais menti

I was living in a crummy basement apartment, having just left my marriage and the suffocating feeling of leading a life that was not my own. I couldn’t understand how it had come to that.