"As a child of the sixties, I should have found that notion ridiculous but I never did. For years, I could not square the fact that I loved Lee with my conviction that I should have walked away. That what I had done was wrong, but it wasn't a mistake...Perhaps there is in every life an action, an event, whether great or small, that is meant to life restlessly at the heart of who we are; if we're lucky, it teaches us how to be human."
Necessary Sins gets interesting not just for the story it tells about how Darling meeting her Lee Lescaze, but about their life afterwards.
"All marriages begin in myth, a carapce under which the real marriage takes shape. Since Lee and I had plundered one marriage to make another, our initial idea of romance yielded reluctantly to the reality of daily life. You do not break up a marriage only to argue over the dishes with the one who was meant to take you away from the dullness of arguing over the dishes."As many memoirs do, this ends with a death, a rebirth, and more than enough pages dedicated to her saintly duties as caretaker for a husbanding slowly wasting away.
"If this catastrophe had to to happen, then it was only right that it happened on my watch, given the upheaval in which our life together began."What's surprising to me is the way that Darling is haunted by that initial "upheaval" she created in her husband's first marriage. Does it ever go away? It's a hard concept to appreciate if you, like, me, still wonder if you'll ever find that person at all.
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