Nick Hornby

It took me years to be the woman my mother raised. It took me 4 years, 7 months and 3 days to do it, without her. After I lost myself in the wilderness of my grief, I found my own way out of the woods.

And I didn't even know where I was going until I got there, on the last day of my hike. Thankyou, I thought over and over again, for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn't yet know.

Now in 4 years, I'd cross this very bridge. I'll marry a man in a spot almost visible from where I was standing. Now in 9 years, that man and I would have a son named Carver and a year later, a daughter named after my mother, Bobbi. I knew only that I didn't need to eat with my bare hands anymore. That seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water would be enough, that it was everything. My life, like all lives, mysterious, irrevocable, sacred, so very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be?

Honestly? I'm lonelier in my real life than I am out here. I miss my friends, of course, but it's not as if I have anybody waiting for me at home. How about you?

Why are you here?

My mother used to say something that drove me nuts. There is a sunrise and a sunset every day and you can choose to be there for it. You can put yourself in the way of beauty.

"If your Nerve, deny you - Go above your Nerve" - EMILY DICKINSON and Cheryl Strayed.

What if I forgive myself? What if I was sorry? But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if I wanted to sleep with every single one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if all those things I did were the things that got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

She died a famous woman, denying her wounds, denying her wounds came from the same source as her power.

Ash body. I prefer the ashes of the body. Soft and silver. As a pale light falling to earth.

Finish that sentence. Why do I have to walk 1000 miles?

I don't mind biting. Oh, my God. I can't believe I just said that. I'm so sorry. I've been on my own for a little while.

If you never do anything, you never become anyone.

The life I want, there is no shortcut.

Studying is hard and boring. Teaching is hard and boring. So, what you're telling me is to be bored, and then bored, and finally bored again, but this time for the rest of my life? This whole stupid country is bored! There's no life in it, or color, or fun! It's probably just as well the Russians are going to drop a nuclear bomb on us any day now. So my choice is to do something hard and boring, or to marry my… Jew, and go to Paris and Rome and listen to jazz, and read, and eat good food in nice restaurants, and have fun! It's not enough to educate us anymore Ms. Walters. You've got to tell us why you're doing it.

It's funny though, isn't it? All that poetry and all those songs, about something that lasts no time at all.

One of the boys I dated, and they were boys, suggested that we go to Paris and I said I'd always wanted to see Paris. As if I'd never been!

I don't want to lose my virginity to a piece of fruit.

You're my father again now, are you? And what were you when you encouraged me to throw my life away? Silly schoolgirls are always getting seduced by glamorous older men, but what about you two?

If people die the moment that they graduate, then surely it's the things we do beforehand that count.

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

Top five things I miss about Laura. One; sense of humor. Very dry, but it can also be warm and forgiving. And she's got one of the best all time laughs in the history of all time laughs, she laughs with her entire body. Two; she's got character. Or at least she had character before the Ian nightmare. She's loyal and honest, and she doesn't even take it out on people when she's having a bad day. That's character.

I miss her smell, and the way she tastes. It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.

I really dig how she walks around. It's like she doesn't care how she looks or what she projects and it's not that she doesn't care it's just, she's not affected I guess, and that gives her grace. And five; she does this thing in bed when she can't get to sleep, she kinda half moans and then rubs her feet together an equal number of times... it just kills me. Believe me, I mean, I could do a top five things about her that drive me crazy but it's just your garden variety women you know, schizo stuff and that's the kind of thing that got me here.

Sometimes I got so bored of trying to touch her breast that I would try to touch her between her legs. It was like trying to borrow a dollar, getting turned down, and asking for 50 grand instead.

…I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like… Books, records, films - these things matter. Call me shallow but it's the fuckin' truth, and by this measure I was having one of the best dates of my life.

That other girl, or other women, whatever... I mean, I was thinking that they're just fantasies. You know? And they always seem really great because there's never any problems. And if there are, they're cute problems like, you know, we bought each other the same Christmas present, or she wants to go see a movie that I've already seen, you know? And then I come home, and you and I have real problems... and you don't even want to see the movie I want to see, period. There's no lingerie and...

Yes, you do. You have great lingerie, but you also have the cotton underwear that's been washed a thousand times, and it's hanging on the thing and, and they have it too! It's just I don't have to see it because it's not in the fantasy. Do you understand? I'm tired of the fantasy because it doesn't really exist. And there are never really any surprises, and it never really...

The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don't wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules. Anyway... I've started to make a tape... in my head... for Laura. Full of stuff she likes. Full of stuff that make her happy. For the first time I can sort of see how that is done.

So, what am I gonna do now? Just keep jumping from rock to rock, for the rest of my life, until they're not any rocks left? Should I bolt every time I get that feeling in my gut when I meet someone new? Well, I've been listening to my gut since I was 14 years old, and frankly speaking, I've come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.

I can't fire them. I hired these guys for three days a week and they just started showing up every day. That was four years ago.

I can see now I never really committed to Laura. I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and… I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that's suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.

It made sense to pool our collective loathing for the opposite sex, and while we were at it, you get to share a bed with somebody at the same time. We were frightened of being left alone for the rest of our lives. Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at the age of 26, and we were of that disposition.

Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do's and don'ts. First of all you're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.

It would be nice to think that since I was 14, times have changed. Relationships have become more sophisticated. Females less cruel. Skins thicker. Instincts more developed. But there seems to be an element of that afternoon in everything that's happened to me since. All my romantic stories are a scrambled version of that first one.

I own this store called Champions Vinyl. It's located in a neighborhood that attracts the bare minimum of window shoppers. I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original, not rereleased - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I'd feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn't... well... kinda one of them.

Hey, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I've read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I've understood them. They're about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash's autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.

You are as abandoned and noisy as any character in a porn film, Laura. You are Ian's plaything, responding to his touch with shrieks of orgasmic delight. No woman in the history of the world is having better sex than sex you are having with Ian... in my head.

My desert island, all-time, top-five most memorable breakups, in chronological order, are as follows: Alison Ashmore; Penny Hardwick; Jackie Alden; Charlie Nicholson; and Sarah Kendrew. Those were the ones that really hurt. Can you see your name on that list, Laura? Maybe you'd sneak into the top ten. But there's just no room for you in the top five, sorry. Those places are reserved for the kind of humiliation and heartbreak you're just not capable of delivering.

Songs at my funeral: "Many Rivers to Cross" by Jimmy Cliff, "Angel" by Aretha Franklin, and I've always had this fantasy that some beautiful, tearful woman would insist on "You're the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me" by Gladys Knight. But who would that woman be?

I could've wound up having sex back there. And what better way to exorcise rejection demons than to screw the person who rejected you, right? But you wouldn't be sleeping with a person, you'd be sleeping with the whole sad, single-person culture. It'd be like sleeping with Talia Shire in Rocky if you weren't Rocky. I feel guilty enough as it is.

Alison married Kevin! I am fine now! Married her junior high school sweetheart: kissed me on the bench, kissed Kevin on the bench - MARRIED Kevin. This is great! This has got nothing to do with me! This is fate, this is destiny; it is beyond my control, beyond my fault. I love this!

Look at these. I used to dream I'd be surrounded by exotic women's underwear forever and ever. Now I know they just save their best pairs for the nights they know they're going to sleep with somebody.

One moment they weren't there - in not any form that interested us, anyway. And, then, the next. We couldn't miss them. They were everywhere. And they'd grown breasts! And we wanted - actually, we didn't even know what we wanted. But, it was something interesting. Disturbing.

And then we made love. It was great. That's it. I'm not going to go into all that other stuff, you know, the who did what to whom stuff. You know that song, "Behind Closed Doors," by Charlie Rich? It's one of my favorite songs. I can say we had a good time. I can say that.

You have to think like an American. You'll feel so homesick that you'll want to die, and there's nothing you can do about it apart from endure it. But you will, and it won't kill you. And one day the sun will come out - you might not even notice straight away, it'll be that faint. And then you'll catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past. Someone who's only yours. And you'll realize… that this is where your life is.

I'd forgotten what this town is like. What were you planning to do, Miss Kelly? Keep me away from Jim? Stop me from going back to America? Perhaps you didn't even know. Perhaps it was enough for you to know that you could ruin me. My name is Eilis Fiorello.

Dear Rose, thank you for your letter. I was happy to hear about your golf tournament. You must have been really pleased. I still miss you and Mother and think about you every day, but I think I can say that for the first time since I've been in America, I'm really happy. This has a lot to do with Tony. At the weekend, he took me to see the Brooklyn Dodgers, the baseball team he loves. They lost, so he was annoyed. But I've also started to look for office work, too. I had an interview this week at a textile firm here in Brooklyn. Who'd have thought there would be two bookkeepers in the family? I'll soon be able to afford to come home and see you and Mammy.

Dear, Rose. I suppose the most important news is that I have a boyfriend. He isn't as important as Bartocci's and my night classes, I know that, but I want to tell you everything that's going on. Please don't mention it to Mammy, though. You know what she's like. He's decent and kind, and he has a job and he works hard. We go to the cinema on Wednesdays and he takes me to Father Flood's dance on Saturdays. I think of you and Mother every single day, but Tony has helped me to feel that I have a life here I didn't have before I met him. My body was here, but my life was back in Ireland with you. Now it's halfway across the sea. So that's something, isn't it?