Juliet, Naked

The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning, and he’d managed to do that with just about everybody he’d ever met or married or fathered. The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

“Can I trust this one?” said Tucker.
“It’s the National Health Service. They usually want to keep you out of the hospital. The government can’t afford you, and anyway the hospitals kill you.”

She really hadn’t thought the museum thing through, when she first took the job. She hadn’t worked out that it would make absolutely everything, even a one-night stand, feel as though it were already over, behind glass, a poignant relic of an earlier, happier time.