“I wish I were really young, like you. Eight is, like, the best age.""Really?""I don't know. To be honest, I don't remember being eight.""That's good.""Why?""I don't want to remember being eight either.”

“I wish we could keep on forgetting to remember ourselves.”

“I convince myself that I am having fun playing big lawyer in the big city-working all hours, surrounded by a ringing phone and day-old pizza crust. That I am reveling in this life of a caricature. But that would be a lie, because the truth is that I don't really feel much of anything at all. Just a dull ache around my edges.”

“Would you like some of my cranberry sauce?" I ask."I have the same thing, Emily," my dad says. "Why would I want some of yours when I have my own?”

“I haven't yet figured out who I want to be, dear," Ruth says, answering both my questions, and then throws her head back in a hearty, unselfconscious laugh. "I'm not kidding. I haven't figure it out yet. But don't tell my daughters that. I lie to them every day. I tell them they will figure it out, with time. To just keep doing what they are doing. But let me let you in on a little secret, because I think you can handle it.' She leans in to whisper in my ear.All parents lie to their children. It's our duty. But the truth of the matter is, I don't think many of us know what we are doing. We all walk around much of the time confused and very much alone.”

“As I leave my building, Robert wolf-whistles at me, long and drawn out. Probably inappropriate of my doorman, but I appreciate the compliment. "I don't know where you're going," Robert says, "but you're going to knock them dead.""Thanks," I say, and decide it's better to keep to myself that I am headed to the constant-care floor of the Riverdale Retirement Home. The one place where that's a real possibility.”

“That's the blessing and the curse of loss: You don't get to choose what falls within the inevitable dissolution of recollection or what lingers and haunts you late at night, your head heavy with memories, while your husband dreams of scaling walls in spandex tights.This is who I am: someone who simultaneously longs for and fears the commitment of remembering. There is the forgetting, the disintegration of memory, morsel by morsel; and there is the impossibility of forgetting, the scar tissue, with is insulated layers of padding. Both haunt me in their own way.”