PUSHING THE RIVER releases one week from today! Here are some teaser quotes from the novel to whet your appetite.
“I have lived in the company of ghosts. I have known this for a long time – that I rattled around among specters and spirits and wraiths. But I also knew that they were, indeed, my company.”
“He shook her toe a few more times and then went over and sat down on his own side of the bed. It occurred to him that maybe if he got back under the covers and shut his eyes and then opened them up again, it might all be different.”
“When Jeff first left — fourteen years ago today – I could read without glasses, even the smallest print on the train boxes. When my hands reached up to dust those boxes, the craggy blue veins did not stand out starkly against my sallow hands. The skin did not pucker into fascinating, horrifying patterns.”
“She had a nearly overwhelming desire to lie down in the grass right then, halfway along the trail, right there, in the middle of the sculpture garden, and resolve to stay there, not move, not continue, until something changed.”
“I was a Natural Woman. I told my mother she had given me her last Toni home permanent, thank you very much, and gathered up my bras for a ritual burning.”
“There was something just a little goofy about him, the stoop of his shoulders, the enormity of his feet in the ultra-white gym shoes she later learned he had bought that day at Costco. A mortal after all.”
“Something old and very deep within Madeline felt a profound shame. She tamped down the instinct to apologize over and over, to do anything, to do everything, that might possibly make Dan feel better, want to stay, want to hold her, want her.”
“Alongside the shame and the blind anger, the most profound feeling of all was a wish that something, just one thing, could be simple. Clear. Easy. Known.”
“Even the wildly striped hair did nothing to dilute the impact of seeing a child – a very small, very young, very sad, and very scared child – standing there. A child who happened to be seven months pregnant.”