Sublime

‘For all the death in the world, each woman’s grief is her own. It takes a different shape with all of us. But the sad truth is that people will not want your grief a year after you bury your husband. ’Tis the way of it. They’ll go back to thinking of themselves. They’ll go back to their own lives. So let us mourn Martin now, while they will listen

When we spoke on the telephone almost every day, I would ask her what she was doing. Often she would answer, “I’m looking at the babies.” Her oldest baby was then sixty-four.

Everything that had infuriated her about Izzy, even before she’d taken her first breath, had been rooted in that one fear, that she might lose her. And now she had. A thin wail rose from her throat, sharp as the blade of a knife.

In Stet Diana Athill describes the literary brainwashing that led men to be taken more seriously: ‘to a large extent I had been shaped by my background to please men … you actually saw yourself as men saw you, so you knew what would happen if you became assertive and behaved in a way which men thought tiresome and ridiculous. Grotesquely, you would

Mary Poovey, a materialist feminist—a feminist who focuses primarily on how patriarchal and capitalist assumptions force women into socially constructed gender roles—described this clearly. Poovey was attracted to deconstructive techniques for their ability to undermine what she saw as socially constructed gender stereotypes (the belief that such s

Even without Lydia, the world would not level. He and his parents and their lives would spin into the space where she had been. They would be pulled into the vacuum she left

(What about Hannah? They set up her nursery in the bedroom in the attic, where things that were not wanted were kept, and even when she got older, now and then each of them would forget, fleetingly, that she existed—as when Marilyn, laying four plates for dinner one night, did not realize her omission until Hannah reached the table. Hannah, as if s