Michelle Richmond

“And then I think of the kids. It’s not that I have this overwhelming sense that my patients can’t live without me. But for all the talk of adolescent resilience, teenagers are also fragile. What would it do to them if their therapist suddenly vanished? The most elemental difference between my teenage clients and the married couples is this: The adults arrive convinced that nothing I can say will change anything, while the teenagers believe that at any moment I might utter some sort of magical sentence that instantly wipes away the fog. Take Marcus from my Tuesday group. He’s a sophomore at a magnet school in Marin. Marcus is an instigator, combative, always looking to get things off the rails. At our last meeting, he asked me, 'What is the purpose of life? Not the meaning–the purpose?' It was a tough spot for me; once he threw down the challenge, I needed to respond. If my answer missed the mark, I would expose myself as a fraud. If I refused to answer, I would look like a poser who was of no use to the group. 'Difficult question,' I replied. 'If I answer, will you tell us what you think the purpose of life is?' He jiggled his right leg. He wasn’t expecting that. 'Yes,' he replied reluctantly. Experience, time, and education have taught me how to read people and situations. I generally have a decent sense of what someone will say or how they will react, even why people do the things they do, and why certain situations lead to certain outcomes. Yet somehow, when I least expect it, I discover a hole in my knowledge. What I don’t know, perhaps what I haven’t even considered, is this: What does it all add up to, what does it mean? I looked around the circle of teenagers, and I gave it my best shot: 'Strive to be all good, but know that you are not. Try to enjoy every day, but know that you will not. Try to forgive others and yourself. Forget the bad stuff, remember the good. Eat cookies, but not too many. Challenge yourself to do more, to see more. Make plans, celebrate when they pan out, persevere when they don’t. Laugh when things are good, laugh when things are bad. Love with abandon, love selflessly. Life is simple, life is complex, life is short. Your only real currency is time—use it wisely.'”

- Excerpt from The Marriage Pact, by Michelle Richmond

Liane Moriarty

“It was strange, because she always felt that she hid herself from Erika, that she was more 'herself' with her 'true' friends, where the friendship flowed in an ordinary, uncomplicated, grown-up fashion (emails, phone calls, drinks, dinners, banter and jokes that everyone got), but right now, it felt like none of those friends knew her the raw, ugly, childish, basic way that Erika did.” 

“He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable.” 

- Excerpt from Truly, Madly, Guilty, by Liane Moriarty