Great Big Beautiful Life

“Well, if you’d like, I can get you my mom’s phone number and the two of you can compare notes about all the more impressive jobs I could’ve had, and then I can reach out to your dad and let him know I agree you should’ve played basketball in high school.”

“It wasn’t enough for you to kiss me—and let’s be clear here, you kissed me—shut me down, and insult my ability. You had to show up here tonight, to what? Ruin my date? Or—did you not even believe I had a date? Well, guess what! You win! I don’t! He’s not coming after all! He, like you, changed his mind at the last second. I guess I have that effect on a certain kind of man. So if you’re done chasing me down the street to get a good look at my humiliation, I’d love to go home right now and pretend this night—this whole last week—never happened.”

“I feel like you’re mine. Like you’re mine in a way no one else ever has been.”

“He was the love of her life, and he let the world make him too small for her.”

“Don’t say that. I want you in my business. I’m inviting you into my business.”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it, Alice. Every time we try to protect each other, all it does is cost us more time together, and I’m not willing to lose any more. I want to be with you. Nothing else is going to matter to me more than that. Not at the end of my life. Not even now. Nothing will matter more than who I spent my time with, and I want it to be you. I need it to be you.”

“When you don’t have the people who love you around, reminding you who you are, that story feels bigger and realer than anything else. You lose yourself inside the character with your name and face.”

“It’s just that somehow, almost everything you say makes me want to kiss you.”

“It feels like you’ve lived their whole life with them. And I just can’t help but think, we’re not supposed to know how it all ends, this early. It’s too much of a burden.”

“He was the one who built the House of Ives as the world knows it. But I’ve always thought of him as the beginning of the end. The stepping stone that decided the entire path. The first domino that tipped. The one who, for better or worse, set every moment of my life into motion.”

“I was a news story the moment I was born. From before my first breath, there were two distinct Margaret Iveses. There was me, and then there was the other one, the one who belonged to the public. Who got written about. Who people loved at times and hated at others, and no matter where I stood with the public, I understood that it wasn’t really me.”

“Because then, suddenly, they’re incredibly proud, but they’re proud of the accomplishment, not of the work. So you feel like you have to keep accomplishing instead of just creating. It affirms the idea that the value in what you do is how people react to it, and not just in the making of it. I’ve written stuff I’m really proud of that hardly anyone read. I’ve written stuff I’m proud of that no one liked. That doesn’t mean it didn’t deserve to be written.”

“She lies to me too. For whatever it’s worth, Margaret Ives isn’t telling me the truth.”

“I’ve always felt most myself when I’m alone.”

“I promise. I love touching you. I love kissing you. I love hanging out with you. I love this.”

“You know, my mother was ahead of her time. The kind of woman who wanted to have it all. She knew she deserved it too. But the problem is, once you love someone, you can’t have it all anymore. Love comes with sacrifice. That’s how it works.”

“I wanted to punish them, honestly, but I couldn’t figure out any way to do it. The best I could come up with was giving them more spectacle, feeding their unquenchable thirst for drama. They wanted a madwoman, and that’s what I was. I ripped up our gardens and left all the flowers in trash cans at the gate. I left the house barefoot, and chopped off my hair with a pair of kitchen scissors. I wore the same dress I’d worn to our wedding to the burial, and I relished every headline about my deranged behavior, because at least it seemed like proof that I had some control over who they said I was. After a couple of weeks, that stopped soothing the ache and all I wanted was to be alone. To feel my pain completely, without interruption. I sent my mother home, paid the staff, and let them go.”

“Pretending everything’s fine only works for so long. And I don’t know. It freaks me out a little, that I could…that I could feel like this, about someone who’s good at pretending to be fine. That I could miss it, if you’re actually not. It was about me. Like you said.”