I am reading Charming Billy posthaste because we're discussing it on Tuesday. It's by Alice McDermott and I thought I had read it before but it turns out I haven't so I need to hurry up. I get to page 52 and read this:
"My parents, I have to believe, had a marriage that ran the typical course from early infatuation to serious love, to affection occasionally diminished by impatience and disagreement, bolstered by interdependence, fanned now and then by fondness, by humor. That they loved each other is a given, I suppose, although I suppose, too that there were months, maybe years, when their love for one another might have disappeared altogether and their lives proceeded only out of habit or the failure to imagine any other alternative.
A good-enough, a typical kind of mid-twentieth-century marriage that suddenly blossomed into something else in the year she was dying. I hesitate to use the word about a time that was filled with so much pain, that was for me only awful, but I think it was during my mother's illness that my parents became passionate about one another. Their meeting, their courtship, their years raising children, every ordinary day they had spent together until then all became merely the running start they had taken to vault this moment. To sail, gracefully and in tandem, across the abyss."
End of quote. Now who does that remind you of? It's as if a sibling, some very talented sibling wrote this. I love Alice McDermott.
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