But then, I’ve been married a long time.
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But then, I’ve been married a long time.
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Mona Simpson was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1957. Her father was a professor of political science and her mother a speech therapist. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia. She has published four novels, Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1996 she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, and she is a winner of the Whiting Prize and the Lila Wallace award. Her latest novel is Casebook.
More about the author →‘Staring out at the endless gray, Mary wrote a letter to her mother and told her she'd named the baby Jane, the name she'd years ago given her only doll.’
‘He took my left hand and banded a cleft rose petal over my third finger. I knew before looking in the book. ‘Marrying,’ he said. He’s so young, I was thinking.’
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
‘I have driven a car on acid, carried my mother drunk upstairs and slept with numerous men and one woman to no consequence.’
‘Of course your head would get muddled with the other person’s at the end. It was just the practical side of “for better or for worse”. That was friendship so much more than marriage.’
Fiction by Susie Boyt.
Ian Leslie on Barack Obama's election in 2008 and forthcoming administration.
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