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A fascinating read that I truly enjoyed. Wonderfully narrated by Kristen Ariza

Favorite quotes:

"She had to be adopted, Jane decided. A child carried from another land to assuage this woman's desire to experience mother love."

"When she married Lenny, Jane had the feeling that they both extended their lives."

"The point of young people's to be annoying about the truth they saw until it became evident to people like herself. Every generation must leave an impression."

"She was attempting the impossible, to write a history for a people without a race."

"She too had parents who were overeducated and underpaid. It was the worst combination. They had raised her and her sister in a ghetto of artists and poets guaranteeing that they would be alienated from rich children and poor children alike thanks to a cultural and political vocabulary that suggested class and privilege without actual class and privilege. Gauche caviar without the actual caviar."

"A conversation was like a tree. It grew in branches that flowed out from the trunk which meant you couldn't just enter a conversation talking about something random or you would break away from the tree."

"Real money was what they needed now. It would finish the story. It would give meaning to the struggle of the past ten years and money would give Lenny the time and space he needed to make his art."

"The thing about being a woman, a mother, a wife was that if you wanted to be anything more than those things you had to hire another wife. Somebody had to be the wife in a family."

"Rich women got to pay somebody else to be them. A stunt double to make it look like they were doing everything well when in fact they were doing only the fun parts."

"Money would grant her the help and the home she needed to raise her children and to do what she wanted to do which was to tell stories and age richly, that too."

"The truth was she couldn't imagine anybody else she'd rather be living with in an old folks home, which was the same as living in an apocalypse movie, only slower paced."