Arthur

This guy is quickly becoming one of my favorite contemporary authors. His fake memoir - but is it fake? - I thought was brilliant not only in the rather unusual way he told the story but also because I love the way he captures some things with words. Sometimes when I was reading it, I would pass over a paragraph, then go back and read it again, and again, and be amazed that he just put the perfect words on something I have been trying to put in to words but never succeeded. I had to return the book to the library but these parts I highlighted as I read.

And here, finally, was the love she’d been expecting and fearing. The love that cannot be ignored or reasoned through, negotiated with, tamed, made cute or quaint or optional, a love as avoidable as act-of-God weather or resistant bacteria, the rebel army arriving in darkest night. I have known it only once, and I understood when she told me she felt herself voluntarily enslaving herself to him, “and if he’d said we were moving to Ely and I was going to wash toilets and he was going down the mines, I’d have had to do it. I wouldn’t have asked if I was happy about it. I just would have gone. That’s who he was.”

My initial intoxicating love never grew into something more adult, more settled, more profound, though she rightly expected that it would. How much shame should I bear for that? I, too, thought we would make it. But either I was the wrong man or she was the wrong woman or we were the wrong pair or it was the wrong time or I was broken from the moment my mother carelessly laid two eggs instead of one or or or. I could sympathize with the woman, who was every bit as frustrated and frightened and angry as I was.

Arthur Phillips: The Tragedy of Arthur