She knew that what she was going through was nothing special, just garden-variety heartbreak, the sort of thing that poets and novelists had been writing about for hundreds of years, but she also knew, from those same books, that there were people who never recover from it, ones who go on through life beset by a dim and painful longing.

The Big Love: A Novel (ed. Little, Brown, 2004) - ISBN: 9780759511866