This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

I am proud of my father. I am proud of his life’s work. For a brief time I saw how difficult it would be to be a police officer in the city of Los Angeles, how easy it would be to fail at the job, as so many have failed. My father succeeded. He served his city well. I wanted to make note of that.

The only way off a runaway train is to jump, but at that moment the ground looked to be going by so fast that I was paralyzed.

In time, a lot of time, after I left Friday’s and Nashville on a fellowship that allowed me to write my first novel, I came to see that there was something liberating about failure and humiliation. Life as I had known it had been destroyed so completely, so publicly, that in a way I was free, as I imagine anyone who walks away from a crash is free.

In Albert Brooks’s 1985 film Lost in America, a couple cashes in everything they own to tour the country in a giant motor home. Brooks, behind the wheel while Julie Hagerty makes toasted cheese sandwiches in the microwave, is funny. The long shots of the lumbering whale creeping uphill in traffic—funny again. Two people driving a Winnebago was such

My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had invested in not being lost. That’s why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction.

I understood how we long to believe in goodness, especially in the person we promised to love and honor. It isn’t just about them, it is how we want to see ourselves. It says that we are good people, patient and kind.

a great help to me as I started writing fiction. I might not have experienced what happened, but chances were at some point in my life I had felt the emotions.

There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

I believe it is human nature to try to persuade others that our most passionately held beliefs are true, so that they too can know the joy of our deepest convictions.