Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 221

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win," by Jo Piazza.



New mothers and candidates for elected office quickly realize how much caffeine and adrenaline will allow you to accomplish. In the six months since Charlotte returned to Elk Hollow she hadn’t slept more than four hours a night. Now she was on her fifth cup of coffee of the day. Coffee might have been counterproductive to soothing her nerves, but without it she’d have been facedown on the floor. She longed for the coffee even before she closed her eyes at night, anticipating new exhaustion even as she dispelled the old.



Maybe it would be a relief if I didn’t win. Maybe I can do more good outside of office than in it. Maybe my family will be better off if we go back to California. Maybe all of this was a gigantic waste of time and money. Now that she had no way to control the outcome of the situation, she was able to put it in perspective. Maybe the world didn’t need her to fix everything. She’d been smug about that, often self-righteous and heavy-handed. Plenty of people glimpsed ghosts of lives they could have lived. She had at least attempted this one. That was worth something. Wasn’t it? She fingered a piece of paper in her pocket that Kara had slipped into her hand earlier that day. She’d written down a quote she saw on Facebook and liked. “I’ve found that the changes I feared would ruin me have always become doorways.” Charlotte liked it, too.