Excerpt: "...The ground you stand on, literally and psychologically, will shift while you are trying to figure out who you are becoming. That is the particular cruelty and the particular honesty of this configuration: you will have to rebuild yourself and your foundation simultaneously....."

Excerpt: "...The building you have been hiding in has been condemned for years. You felt the cracks. You heard the inspectors. You stayed anyway; the rubble was familiar, and leaving would require admitting you had been living somewhere uninhabitable on purpose. This eclipse finds the building....."

Excerpt: "...You have been trading in a currency that the market no longer accepts. Discipline, endurance, the ability to remain upright while others had the good sense to collapse. You minted those coins yourself, pressed your own face into the metal, and spent decades exchanging them for the only thing you trusted: the certainty that if you could bear enough, you would eventually be worth enough..."