These Are Not Anxious People

I'm currently reading a hauntingly beautiful, but extremely depressing novel about a likeable but messed-up woman dealing with her past and facing her future.

Exposure, by Kathryn Harrison, is incredible, and a couple of quotes have really struck me thus far.

On discussing the past:

She'll talk later, but for now, whatever she remembers threatens to recede, evaporate, when she contemplates articulating it for someone else. Even as she tried just now to tell Carl about posing for her father's camer, it was as if she were trying to recount a dream: what she remembered seemed absurd, and parts of what she had thought was a coherent story were suddenly missing. Her mouth open to speak, she was left with nothing more than the idea of herself at the grade school science fair. Chosen from the audience of children to come stand on the stage, putting her hands over her head at the hypnotist's command.

On searching through other people's medicine cabinets:

These people aren't anxious or depressed. They have sinus infections and athlete's foot. They don't spend the minutes between waking and showering reciting reasons not to kill themselves.

I suspect that people from unhappy families are always searching the cupboards and drawers of happy people. Sliding a hand between the neat stacks of towels in the linen closet, slipping a finger under the hinged lid of a jewel box, flipping furtively through the pages of a book. They are looking everywhere. As if, perhaps, out might fall a list, an outline, the formula for how they do it.