As a vacuum cleaner can start to pull up the actual thread of a carpet, her brains had been sucked dry by too… — Lorrie Moore

Every songwriter in their smallest song seems to possess some monumental grief clarified and dignified by melody, Bill thinks. His own sadnesses, on the other hand, slosh about in his life in a low-key way, formless and self-consuming.

"The United States- how can you live in that country?" the man had asked. Agnes had shrugged. "A lot of my stuff is there," she'd said, and it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitary place that happened to be yours.

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.