1
" I still enjoyed the quiet, upholstered warmth of the front seat of his min-van. I'd spent so many hours in his car, en route to soccer games, school functions, parties, and dates, comforted by the casual strength of his hands, the dry knuckles of his long fingers spread along the steering wheel. My dad knew every road, every vein and artery in the whole state, and he drove confidently, making intermittent conversation while the radio was on, and then turning it off to gently interview me. "
― Nina Renata Aron , Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
3
" When I asked "How are you," she answered with a report on Lucia or her boyfriend, Jim, who was also intermittently in recovery. No, how are you, I wanted to say, but I thought the distinction would be lost on her. "
― Nina Renata Aron , Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
5
" What had people done for me that had truly made me fell loved? she had asked me at the next session. I thought about the time K, with a beatific, postcoital smile, wrote I LOVE U in my menstrual blood on his bedroom wall, just above his bed, dipping his middle finger lingeringly into me like a quill into an inkpot as I watched and laughed and my eyes went wide as teacups. Was that gesture a doing or merely a saying? Was it an action verb? Was it empty or was it a promise? Watching him do it gave me the feeling I'd always understood to be love--something low, rumbling, a little bit evil, a little revolting. Some sick and special secret wizardry that fouls you up with its unexpectedness, its brazenness. "
― Nina Renata Aron , Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
6
" In other families, the answer to the question of how an elder kept a three-decades-long love alive might be "he was a good man" or "he always provided for us," maybe "he made me laugh." In my family, the answer is a sort of insanity. A man holds your interest because he's completely nuts: capricious, unpredictable, unsparing with affection and with everything else. Love is a party that lasts into the small hours of the night, a party you should probably leave but it's so fun you can't. Love is navigating together various forms of precariousness and prevailing not by establishing stability, but by evading debt and death, surviving to eat and drink and fuck at the end of it all. "
― Nina Renata Aron , Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
12
" For a long time, I believed that if I took care of myself, I would necessarily, organically move farther away from others. In the binary logic of individualism, you fortify the self at the expense of the other. But in filling the empty space of me, I have found that actually the complete opposite is true. The more I love myself, the more my heart opens, the more present and sensitive I become, so much so it hurts. "
― Nina Renata Aron , Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
19
" The beauty of San Francisco is in these windows of redemptive splendor, we learned, the days when the fog “burns off,” as they say, and gives way to a piercing, almost perversely joyous sunshine. New Yorkers joke about being in an abusive relationship with the city. In San Francisco, I understood this. We were constantly being pummeled by clouds and rain, then promptly apologized to by sparkling sunshine. This is the thing the city does best: convinces you, through a blustery string of freezing, gunmetal-grey days, that life is shit, and then, when you least expect it and most need it, it seems to practically shatter open, revealing a crystalline brightness that pings light around, reflects it off of everything, and air-dries the pale, soaked buildings. It was a magic trick that got me every time. "
― Nina Renata Aron , Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
20
" ...I drag the kids to the farmers' market and fill out the week's cheap supermarket haul with a few vivid bunches of organic produce...Once home, I set out fresh flowers and put the fruit in a jadeite bowl. A jam jar of garden growth even adorns the chartreuse kids' table...I found some used toddler-sized chairs to go around it...It sits right in front of the tall bookcases...When the kids are eating or coloring there, with the cluster or mismatched picture frames hanging just to their left, my son with his mop of sandy hair, my daughter just growing out of babyhood...they look like they could be in a Scandinavian design magazine. I think to myself that maybe motherhood is just this, creating these frames, the little vistas you can take in that look like pictures from magazines, like any number of images that could be filed under familial happiness. They reflect back to you that you're doing it - doing something - right. In my case, these scenes are like a momentary vacation from the actual circumstances of my current life. Children, clean and clad in brightly striped clothing, snacking on slices of organic plum. My son drawing happy gel pen houses, the flourishing clump of smiley-faced flowers beneath a yellow flat sun. To counter the creeping worry that I am a no-good person, I must collect a lot of these images, postage-stamp moments I can gaze upon and think, I can't be fucking up that bad. Can I? "
― Nina Renata Aron , Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love