Carry the One

Just finished Carol Anshaw's "Carry the One", about a group of friends who accidentally kill a young girl while driving drunk one night.  The book follows the characters after the accident, charting how they each cope with their guilt.  Unsurprisingly, the book is super depressing, but has some great passages:

• "Helping her students make art that was hideous but meaningful to them was a small torment Alice had devised for herself."
• "Telling people you are an astronomer, he found, was not usually a conversation starter.  Or, worse, it started a conversation with the other person telling you his sign."
• "Marriage and parenthood seemed fascinating to her right from the start.  [Her husband] had come into the picture already assembled, a full complement of personality aspects with which she had to acquaint herself.  [Her son] was a total surprise.  Until his arrival, she had only considered him hypothetically, as someone small who would need to be fed and changed and kept from harm and illness.  One or another of the generic babies on the covers of the books she read in preparation.  From the moment of his birth, though, he had been such a specific person."
• "Romance no longer looked like so much fun, more like a repetitive stress injury -- beginning with Maude, but by now also including all the failed and pathetic attempts to replicate that constellation of emotion with someone else.  She could measure this past effort in all the underwear she had left behind in apartments, all the bottles of pricey wine she had brought to dinner, all the recitations of bad childhoods and adult disappointments she had earnestly listened to."