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240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
“At the time I’d set out, all women were expected to get married ... but by the end of this period – it was only eight years, not so long after all – a wave had swept through, changing the landscape completely. ... Sexual jealousy was like using the wrong fork, marriage was a joke, and those already married found their once-solid unions crumbling like defective stucco. You were supposed to hang loose, to collect experiences, to be a rolling stone.She has a rather fractious relationship with her parents, feeling their critical “thought rays” halfway across the country. She also has a rather fragile younger sister Lizzie.
Isn’t that what I’d been doing, years before the widespread advent of facial hair and roach clips? But I felt myself too old, or possibly too solemn, for the love beads and pothead crowd. They wanted to live in the moment, but like frogs, not like wolves ... But I was raised in the age of strenuousness. Relaxation bored me”
“She takes a pill every day, for a chemical imbalance she was born with. That was it, all along. That was what made the bad times for her. Not my monstrousness at all. I believe that, most of the time.”In the second half of the book, she moves in with Tig, a separated father of two boys with a complicated relationship with his ex, Oona, who initially was Nell’s friend and mentor in the publishing business. Moral Disorder is the defining chapter, describing her increasingly complex and compromised life on the small decrepit farm they buy; it’s one of my favourites and there really isn't space here to add all the quotes or excerpts I wanted to.
At the end of the story "The Entities", Atwood writes: "But what else could I do with all that? thinks Nell, wending her way back to her own house. All that anxiety and anger, those dubious intentions, those tangled lives, that blood. I can tell about it or I can bury it. In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same." What a writer.