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Jennifer Weiner

Jennifer Weiner Books

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Good in Bed

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That Summer

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Big Summer

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Who Do You Love

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Fly Away Home

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In Her Shoes

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Related Quotes

“Invite him to poetry club," Doff said with a smirk. "See if he asks you to take a look at his Emily Dickinson." Beatrice snorted. "How long did it take you to think that up?" "Most of lunch, and the rest of G block," Doff said, shrugging modestly. "I started with 'read his Charles Dickens,' but Charles Dickens is a novelist." "What about his Philip K. Dick?" "Who's that?" asked Doff. "He wrote the book that got turned into Blade Runner.”

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“Finally, Diana had worked her way down to the Abbey, an upscale restaurant with a small but lush courtyard that featured a tinkling fountain, a pair of wooden benches, flowering bushes and stands of tall grasses, and a statue resembling Rodin's The Thinker (one of the few things she did remember from the art history class she'd taken). She'd never eaten there, but she remembered Dr. Levy mentioning it as one of the places she and her husband visited for date night at least once every summer. She sat on the bench for a minute to rest her feet and peruse the menu. Tuna sushi tempura (eighteen dollars for an appetizer). Almond-crusted cod with a mandarin-citrus beurre blanc (twenty-eight dollars) and butter-poached lobster (market price). The list of cocktails and special martinis ran two pages, and when she walked up the curved stone steps and stepped into the dining room, the views of the bay were gorgeous.”

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“She'd gotten the butcher to grind a mixture of filet mignon and chuck steak for the burgers, and had blended in mushrooms and blue cheese; she'd ordered hot dogs from Chicago, which came delivered in a cooler of dry ice. She'd made her own barbecue sauce, plus dozens of elaborate canapés, slivers of smoked salmon on cucumbers and a refined version of onion dip, where she spent an hour caramelizing onions.”

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“When Diana finally felt ready, they went back to the shelter in Dennis and found a medium-sized mutt, a cheerful fellow with bushy brown fur and eyes like bright black buttons. He seemed to be the result of the union between a corgi and some kind of terrier, and, like Willa, he'd been abandoned, tied up underneath a bridge, starving, with his fur full of mats and burrs and every kind of bug. Diana and Michael brought him home. They brushed the remaining dirt and twigs and burrs out of his coat, and fed him kibble soaked in chicken broth, and tossed a tennis ball for him to fetch. Eventually, his favorite thing became sitting in the prow of a kayak with his back paws on the base of the boat and his front paws on its top, gazing out across the water as Diana paddled.”

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“Rose leaned against the bathroom door. Here it was — her real life, the truth of who she was, barreling down on her like a bus with bad brakes. Here was the truth — she wasn’t the kind of person Jim could fall in love with. She wasn’t what she’d made herself out to be — a cheerful, uncomplicated girl, a normal girl with a happy, orderly life, a girl who wore pretty shoes and had nothing more pressing on her mind that whether ER was a rerun this week. The truth was in the exercise tape she didn’t have time to unwrap, let alone exercise to; the truth was her hairy legs and ugly underwear. Most of all, the truth was her sister, her gorgeous, messed-up, fantastically unhappy and astoundingly irresponsible sister.”

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Book:In Her Shoes
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“Here we have filet of roasted halibut, caught this morning right here in Cape Cod Bay. It's pan-seared in a sauce of black garlic, blistered cherry tomatoes, and shishito peppers, both from Longnook Farms, served over a bed of coconut-lime rice with sautéed bok choy." She set the second dish down in front of Diana. "Here we have a confit of Maple Hill Farm duck leg and roasted duck breast in a balsamic-fig reduction, served over sweet-potato hash, with local roasted ramps.”

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“Daisy had her preheat the oven, remove the chicken from its plastic, rinse it, and pat it dry. "Dry skin is crispy skin," Daisy said, encouraging Diana to blot the chicken skin until there was no moisture remaining. "Some recipes have you leave the chicken in the refrigerator, uncovered, for the moisture to evaporate from the skin. Some chefs even use a blow-dryer on the skin." Diana looked at her skeptically. "You're kidding, right?" "Hand to God," said Daisy. "It probably looks ridiculous, but I'm sure it works.”

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“Diana loosened a sliver of halibut with her fork and slipped it into her mouth. She closed her eyes, tasting the sweetness of the fish; the tart, juicy tomatoes; oil and butter and garlic and thyme. "Good?" asked Reese. His eyes were dark brown behind his glasses, and there was a deep dimple in his left cheek. She chewed and swallowed. "So good." He was still watching her, clearly expecting more. "I don't even like fish, usually. But this- it's so sweet! The tomatoes..." "They're from a farm in Truro. They turn into jam when you reduce them. They're my favorite," he said, voice lowered, like he was telling her a secret, or like he didn't want to hurt the figs' or the bok choy's feelings. "We source as many of our ingredients locally as we can. Our milk and eggs, our butter, our honey- everything we can get from around here, we do.”

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“One giant bowl of perfectly cooked ramen in rich, golden pork broth, densely packed with noodles and with an egg, boiled to just the right degree of softness, perched on top, beneath a sprinkling of bright, crunchy green scallions. She could almost taste it, and feel it in her mouth, the rich glide of egg yolk, the chewy, toothsome tangle of noodles, the sharp bite of scallion, and the comforting warmth of the broth, as salty as the ocean.”

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“She thought about the kind of harm a person could inflict intentionally- through murder or robbery or rape- and about the kind that happened by accident, to people who weren't the targets at all, but just happened to be proximate, or in the way. Undeserving, innocent people who suffered for the crimes of others. She thought about women and children whose only crime was wandering into the blast zone, or being the son or daughter of the wrong man. The son, or the daughter, or the wife. The lady or the tiger, she thought. Truth or dare. Your money or your life.”

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“Chicken Francese, or lamb chops, or plump spinach gnocchi that she'd roll out by hand and drop into boiling salt water. When her brothers came home for the holidays, she'd spend days in the kitchen, preparing airy latkes and sweet and sour brisket; roast turkey with chestnut stuffing; elaborately iced layer cakes. She'd stay in the kitchen for hours, cooking dish after dish, hoping that all the food would somehow conceal their father's absence; hoping that the meals would take the taste of grief out of their mouths. "After my father died, I think cooking saved me. It was the only thing that made me happy. Everything else felt so out of control. But if I followed a recipe, if I used the right amounts of the right ingredients and did everything I was supposed to do..." She tried to explain it- how repetitive motions of peeling and chopping felt like a meditation, the comfort of knowing that flour and yeast, oil and salt, combined in the correct proportions, would always yield a loaf of bread; the way that making a shopping list could refocus her mind, and how much she enjoyed the smells of fresh rosemary, of roasting chicken or baking cookies, the velvety feel of a ball of dough at the precise moment when it reached its proper elasticity and could be put into an oiled bowl, under a clean cloth, to rise in a warm spot in the kitchen, the same step that her mother's mother's mother would have followed to make the same kind of bread. She liked to watch popovers rising to lofty heights in the oven's heat, blooming out of their tins. She liked the sound of a hearty soup or grain-thickened stew, simmering gently on a low flame, the look of a beautifully set table, with place cards and candles and fine china. All of it pleased her.”

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“She had already tied on her apron and started tapping notes into her phone as Daisy laid out the ingredients: a whole kosher chicken; a bottle of olive oil, a pound of butter, a lemon. Onions, garlic, shallots, shiitake mushrooms, Parmesan cheese, and a container of arborio rice; fresh rosemary and thyme, a bag of carrots, a half-pound of asparagus, and a half-pound of sugar snap peas. That was for dinner. For pantry staples, she'd gotten flour, white and brown sugar, kosher salt and Maldon salt, pepper, chili, and paprika; for the refrigerator: milk, eggs, and half-and-half, and, for a housewarming gift, a copy of Ruth Reichl's My Kitchen Year and two quarts of her own homemade chicken stock.”

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“She could read Hal's thoughts, evident in the lines of his body, his tensed shoulders and narrowed eyes: I will hurt you. And she smiled even more widely, knowing that he couldn't. For once, finally, she was the one with the power, the knowledge, the upper hand. His life was an oyster, dropped from a great height onto a rocky shore. Now his shell had been cracked open and the soft, defenseless meat had been exposed. Hal couldn't protect himself. Not from this. The only question left was how much damage she would do.”

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“I gave you everything," Hal shouted. "No, you took everything!" she yelled back. "You took my name away!" Hal looked as bewildered as if she'd slapped him. Then his jolly, reasonable look was back, the mask once again in place. "Daisy," he said, his voice calm. "That's not my name!" she shrieked. He reached out to put his hands on her shoulders, as he'd done so many times before, to hold her still, to instruct her, and in her head she ducked and saw Hal stumbling forward, grabbing for the wobbly post, the one that had never been repaired. She saw his feet skid on the slick surface of the deck, saw his arms pinwheeling, hands groping, reaching for her, for help that wouldn't come. She saw him fall, thudding down one, two, three, four, five, six flights of stairs, to lie, broken and motionless, on the sand, limbs twisted, eyes open to the rain. She saw herself look down at him, seeing nothing but a male body around a man-shaped void. Not a man at all, but a creature with cold, flat eyes, a monster with instincts for self-preservation and a species of low cunning, but not a man, not a person who had loved her, or anyone.”

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“She thought about Hal, the man she'd lived with for almost twenty years, the man she'd slept beside almost every night. She remembered a famous optical illusion; a drawing that could be either a beautiful young woman or an ugly old hag, depending on how you saw it. For almost twenty years, she'd seen only the good- a loving, kind, generous husband; a beautiful house; a beloved, cherished daughter. But for the past weeks and months, things had been changing. It felt like she had finally seen the witch, after years of only seeing the young woman, and now she couldn't un-see. I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. But you would have it so.”

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“Willa head-butted his calf, then thumped down on her haunches, looking up at him with her tongue lolling and her eyes bright. The guy reached into his pocket again, looked a question at Diana, and, at her nod, tossed Willa something small and round and reddish-brown. Willa hopped up on her hind legs and caught it on the fly, a maneuver Diana had never seen her perform, of which she'd never suspected Willa was capable. "Dehydrated hot dogs," he said. "What?" "You buy a pack of the cheapest hot dogs you can find, cut 'em into slices, then nuke the slices in the microwave for ten minutes. My dad taught me to always carry them around. Even the meanest dog will leave you alone if you give him a few of these." He tossed up another treat. This time, Willa did a running leap to snatch it out of the air, and he smiled.”

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“Death would be too easy. Death would let him off the hook. Life, though, life with the knowledge that Daisy knew what he'd done and who he was... that would be close to intolerable for a man as proud as Hal Shoemaker. Let him live, like a parachutist with his straps cut, tumbling down and down, forever. Let him live, with his every moment a torment, every hour burning.”

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“So, Nora leaves him in the end," she said, as they walked down the stairs. "What?" "In the play. A Doll's House." "That's right." Beatrice went to the sink. "She says she can't be anyone's wife or anyone's mother until she knows who she is. She walks out of their house and closes the door behind. It's this iconic moment. At least, that's what our teacher said." "That's very interesting.”

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“At six, Daisy slid the stuffed figs and the pastry-wrapped goat cheese purses into the oven, crammed her feet into a pair of navy-blue high heels, and put a giant straw hat with a navy-blue ribbon on her head. The theme of the party was the Kentucky Derby, even though the Derby itself wasn't until May. At least it had made the menu easy: mint julep punch and bourbon slushies, fried chicken sliders served on biscuits, with hot honey, tea sandwiches with Benedictine spread, bite-sized hot browns, the signature sandwich of Louisville, and miniature Derby pies for dessert.”

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“That first night, after she'd made sure the door was locked and turned out the lights, Diana climbed into the loft and got into bed. She could see Willa's silhouette below her, sitting on her haunches at the foot of the stairs. "Come on, girl, it's okay," she said, patting the bed, and Willa had gathered herself, trotting up the stairs and leaping onto the mattress, her tail rotating madly. She licked Diana's hand, sniffed her way around the perimeter of the bed, then turned herself around three times and curled up on her side, with her back against Diana's hip. Diana wrapped her arm around the dog's head, and Willa rested her muzzle on Diana's forearm. That was how they fell asleep.”

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