Monday, December 29, 2014

the last book I ever read (All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, excerpt three)

from All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews:

I said goodbye to Julie and drove around the city for a while wanting and not wanting to drive past the old house on Warsaw Avenue, trying and not trying to remember those years of marital happiness.

Dan, my second ex, the father of Nora, raised Will as his own while Will’s biological father, my first ex, was in the States embracing volatility, and we both really felt like we’d gotten things right this time around after crappy first marriages, that at long last we’d resolved the agonies of unfulfilled romantic yearnings and were finished with bad decisions. Now we’re engaged in a war of attrition but mostly, like modern lovers, through texts and e-mails. We have very brief truce-like moments at times when we’re either too tired to fight or somehow simultaneously feeling nostalgic and full of goodwill. Sometimes he sends me links to songs he thinks I’ll like or essays about waves or whatever, the universe, or apologies for a million things and sometimes he gets drunk and writes long scathing diatribes, litanies of my failures—which are legion.



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