Lisa Unger

She understood for the first time in her life how people might kill each other—married people who once loved with passion and devotion, who once cried happy tears at the altar, and went on a magnificent honeymoon, conceived beautiful children, built a lovely life.

You don’t get to stop being what you are, even when you try.

Marriage. Was there ever anything more set up to fail, to disappoint, to erode? Come on.

If you didn’t give people what they wanted, they became angry. Or they pulled away. And then the game was harder or lost altogether.

“Do you love me?”

“I do,” she said, trying to sound light. “You know I do.”

She tried to block out the image of Geneva on top of him

He’ll do it again, honey. Cheaters keep cheating.

In some sense—war, climate change, genocide, cults, pedophilia, rape, murder, most crime in general—men were responsible for a good portion of the world’s ills.

In this Instagram world, everyone wanted to broadcast filtered versions of their best moments, and bury everything else.

All the dull, shameful things, all the flawed, failed ventures and endeavors, hidden. Where did people put those things?

Something fired off in Pearl’s brain, the kind of joy she could only achieve when thinking about fiction—the words of others, or the stories that she herself wove, alone in her bed at night.