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I like to keep my inbox around 6-7 items that I need to act on and delete or file everything else. I think that just means I am a bit OCD. 🤣 Close Reads emails hang out in there until I listen to the episode, then I can delete them and see the list shrink.

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Thinking about grace, in the first section Marie's deathbed scene has a comment in which it is clear she's offering up her suffering for her father:

"It was probably only because of her delirium that she kept on saying—”for Papa!—for Papa!”…Do you remember the sound of her voice when she suddenly cried out, “Please, God, I am only a child…” and how she stopped, and went on, “No, I can stand it, I can…”?"

That's also an important source of grace in his life. It comes up again near the very end of the novel.

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Everything about Marie tears at my heart. It is not a coincidence that she is named for Mary.

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This episode is fantastic; great and sobering observation that all the problems are super pedestrian, but that it's just a few wrong moves/interactions/decisions to get on the path to such dysfunction.

I also appreciated the delve into Louis's appalling comments about his wife being so taken up with the "grubs" (not sure if I remember correctly the exact word he used to describe his children). I'm going to go ahead and tell myself that the French word Mauriac used there could also be taken to mean baby snakes (like worm=snake sometimes in English).

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founding

Sean, kudos on your French “r” pronunciation! 👌🏽;)

Why does Mauriac give us the narrator’s pretty lucky sighting of Hubert at the restaurant? It’s probably not the only chance circumstance in the book, but it sticks out when later when he refers to his own powers of perception and no one being able to get anything past him…. Well maybe I’ve just answered my own question.

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