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For years I__ been awaiting that overriding urge I__ always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers_ strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. (With child: There__ a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgement that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: ____ pregnant._ I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother__ deepest fear.) (27)
Lionel Shriver We Need to Talk About Kevin
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For years I__ been awaiting that overriding urge I__ always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers_ strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. (With child: There__ a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgement that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: ____ pregnant._ I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother__ deepest fear.) (27)
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Lionel Shriver

We Need to Talk About Kevin

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