Here’s what you need to know about the Wren family: Aside from being assholes, they’re also fucking frauds. And I don’t say that from a place of bias. I’m what the experts call a voice of God narration (God for short— who has the time for honorifics?) and I’m mostly here to observe and make the occasional comment as related to your understanding of the plot. So, like I said, the first thing to know about the Almighty House of Wren is that it’s a crumbling mess of conflict and lies, with the general obfuscation of reality as a treat.

All the training. Boarding school from the age of twelve so Meredith could compete with the very best. The exclusive summer camps, the private tutoring, the people she’d been forced to gut from her life, the perfection she was made to chase. All those years of fucking tennis, day in and day out, just so that she could hold it longer, endure it worse, survive it more. She hadn’t suffered just for fear of obsolescence or the goddamn economy. It was always, always for this.

It began somewhere inside her, in something she already was and had always been. As if by choosing to be ruled by some velocity inside herself she was somehow a worse daughter, less virtuous than her younger sister. As if it were inherently disloyal to want precisely what Thayer would have demanded for himself. As if Meredith— as a person with ambitions and plans and all the things Thayer had wanted his son to have, only to overlook those same similarities in his eldest daughter— had betrayed him by not remaining devotedly at his side, practically his personal maidservant, and had instead done what children are supposed to do and grown up.

It engulfed her. It made her feel the way love was supposed to make her feel, the way other people talked about sex. She couldn’t talk about ballet without a noticeable degree of horniness, as if desire and dance were inseverable, as if she couldn’t feel passion any other way but on her toes, with the tips of her fingers so far outstretched as if to graze the cheek of God. (…) How did you tell someone— man, woman, anyone— that you would rather achieve perfection than eat a slice of pizza? And in New York! Not a single person could understand her, not even the lovers she did take, who were all— put frankly— artistically inferior. Even the ones who claimed her same level of devotion still concerned themselves to some degree with rest, with sex, which Eilidh didn’t. She partook in it. She dabbled in it. But even in bed she was dancing. It was all she had ever wanted to do.

She had never been an expert before, as such a thing implied maturity and age; instead, she’d been only an ingenue, a protégée, a possibility of a person. A break on the horizon. It occurred to her that the chance to grow up was an appealing one, if terrifying.

The world rejoices, for thusly an earth-shaker walks among us! Blessed are the eldest daughters for they shall inherit the generational burdens, et cetera, et cetera— what can possibly go wrong!

But she wanted to be perfect; that was the kind of love that, in her better moments, she thought she might deserve. That maybe love was something she could be good at, that she could conceivably do correctly, that she could earn, that she could win. From the beginning she had understood that success amounted simply to mind over matter— that if she could put aside the pain, she could do anything. She could do anything.

And it hurt, perfection hovering eternally out of reach.

Philippa was trying to use jealousy as a weapon, but Gillian refused to cut herself on any blade she hadn’t forged herself.

He looked at her, and she remembered that she had been close enough to read him once. Once upon a time he had telegraphed everything she needed to know with a glance, like they’d been made from the same stuff. Like before Babel had fallen, some prior versions of themselves were laid in the same brick, sharing the same mortar, such that they’d always been able to speak the same language no matter what forms they took.

“No,” was nearly Jamie’s answer, “no, she doesn’t make me happy, when I’m with her I don’t even know what happiness is or what it means, it seems too small and unimaginative an idea, I’m not sure happiness was ever even real, I mean what is that? I was happy before her, now I’m something else, something sickly and weak and yet massive and esoteric, I am confounding and arcane, I am consumed by something ancient and universal and yet no one has ever felt the way I feel, I’m sick with it, I’m sick to death with it, I want to hold her forever, I want to crawl inside her heart and wear her skin!

She didn’t know why she’d done it, only that it soothed her, the work, the sequential nature of its deadlines, the feeling like arbitrary measures of success placed upon her by the divinity of academia might contribute to some larger sense of worth. Achieving recognition in the act of life itself.

Is that what you think? Gillian wanted to ask. That I would ever be capable of thinking the worst of you? Of thinking that you are anything but the object of all my dreaming, the soft landing for my tired heart?

But as I get older, I achieve a pretty sublime form of clarity in which I accept myself, and no longer fear that my borders are permeable to the approval of others. As time goes on, I am less and less susceptible to the expectations of those outside myself, and as a result, the person I am can be more gently cherished.

I think for an hour about what it means to be alive, or I stare at the wall and contemplate whether I’ll ever not feel tired again. Everything changes. Everything changes. Nothing is ever the same (affectionate). Nothing is ever the same (threat).