“Henri said our names were fitting because we were destined to be together in our old age, like our great-great-aunts. Two gray old ladies in the bodies of teenage girls. Someday we’d live in a big ...”

“She ran a streak of foundation under each eye, highlighter down the bridge of her nose, and bronzer beneath each cheekbone—a layer of armor before battle. Because that’s what these parties were to ...”

“Nobody could hold the same place in your heart as your sister. Love or hate her, she was the only person who grew up exactly like you, who knew the secrets of your household—the laughter that only ...”

“Henri held herself as if only her arms could keep her pieced together, and I saw that behind all her fake control—throwing herself at a teacher, carving our dad out of her heart—was something fragi...”

“In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find and continue to find grounds for marriage.”

“You don't know when you're twenty-three.You don't know what it really means to crawl into someone else's life and stay there. You can't see all the ways you're going to get tangled, how you're goin...”

“Even the jerks earn some of our affection. We can be glad they're gone and yet still mourn the good parts.”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”