". . . and wasn't life full of layers and nuances, colored all kinds of shades of gray, and the way you felt about something when you were twenty or thirty or forty was not how you would feel about something when you were fifty or sixty or seventy -- if only he could explain to her that regret can come at any time in your life, when you least expect it, and then you are stuck with it forever."
Richard didn't intend to divorce his wife. He was horrified to wake up one day and realize how short the rest of his life was and how he couldn't justify staying somewhere he hated. He muses about how unpredictable one's own emotions can be in relation to learned experiences.
“Playing with them was boring, and it wasn't even their fault. It was just the notion of playing itself. She had never gotten the hang of it, even when she was a child. You needed to be able to adopt a personality other than your own in order to fully immerse yourself in the world of play, and it was burden enough carrying her own self around.”
Edie is ashamed to admit that she doesn't enjoy playing with her grandkids. They exist in a world so different from hers, so rooted in imagination and fun, two things which Edie has never afforded herself. Her life is too serious to be compatible with theirs. Although sad, this revelation reveals a core value in Edie that she doesn't believe in pretense and struggles to express her own negative emotions.
"Middlestein thought texting was the same as Morse code, and the more people texted, the closer America came to being a nation at war."
The town in which Edie's family lives, Middlestein, is symptomatic of the family's poor communication. These people are suspicious and conservative in their approach to relationships. Preferring face to face and often indulging gossip, they create a social environment which rejects the outsider and invites scandal.
“Suddenly Robin felt relief: Her mother had a life outside her home, outside of sitting there at that kitchen table, stewing in her own flesh, in the layers of hate and frustration and anger and heartbreak that she had been building up for so long. If she came here regularly, and she was helping people, then maybe she could be saved after all."
Robin misses how active her mother used to be. Often she pictures Edie just sitting around, alone, in the dark and she feels pity for her mom, but here she discovers that actually Edie has just kept her active life a secret. She hasn't ceased to be the active, political woman that Robin remembers from childhood, but Robin has been removed from the privilege of knowing about it.
