“Morrissey was my Mrs. Garrett, the house mother from the Facts of Life, a soothing adult figure giving me words of wisdom.”

“I was too young to know adult life is full of accidents and interrupted moments and empty beds you climb into and don't climb out of.”

“The Word 'Repulse': I hate this word. I believe 'repel' is a perfectly good word, and 'repulsion' is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says 'compulse' or 'impulse' as a verb. So why would you ever say 'repulse'? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renee looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think I'm right.”

“Roller Boogie is a relic from - when else? - the '70s. This is a tape I made for the eight-grade dance. The tape still plays, even if the cogs are a little creaky and the sound quality is dismal. It's a ninety-minute TDK Compact Cassette, and like everything else made in the '70s, it's beige. It takes me back to the fall of 1979, when I was a shy, spastic, corduroy-clad Catholic kid from the suburbs of Boston, grief-stricken over the '78 Red Sox. The words "douche" and "bag" have never coupled as passionately as they did in the person of my thirteen-yer-old self. My body, my brain, my elbows that stuck out like switchblades, my feet that got tangled in my bike spokes, but most of all my soul - these formed the waterbed where douchitude and bagness made love sweet love with all the feral intensity of Burt Reynolds and Rachel Ward in Sharkey's Machine.”

“Did I learn anything? No way. But all the things you want to learn fromgrief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. Youjust get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won’t remember where you live.You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief and you think, Maybe this one will unveil some sublime truth about life anddeath and pain. But on the other side, there’s just more grief.”

“For two weeks, I lay awake at night and said Hail Marys over and over to stop my heart from beating too fast. I suddenly realized how much being a husband was about fear: fear of not being able to keep somebody safe, of not being able to protect somebody from all the bad stuff you want to protect them from. Knowing they have more tears in them than you will be able to keep them from crying. I realized that Renee had seen me fail, and that she was the person I was going to be failing in front for the rest of my life. It was just a little failure, but it promised bigger failures to come. Additional ones, anyway. But that's who your wife is, the person you fail in front of. Love it so confusing; there's no peace of mind.”

“It’s not human to let go of love, even when it’s dead. We expected one of these monthlyanniversaries to be the Final Goodbye. We figured that we’d said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we had to give. We’d passed the testand would get back what we’d lost. But instead, every anniversary it hurt more, and every anniversary it felt like she was further away from comingback. The idea that there wouldn’t be a final goodbye—that was a hard goodbye to say in itself and, at that point, still an impossible goodbye. Noprivate eye has to tell you it’s a long goodbye.”