Dont Stop – Bonnie Friedman

Guilt snared her for having vanished from the lives of her elderly parents. But when she did talk to her mother these days, even briefly, she had this peculiar sensation she’d installed a dummy of herself while the real Ina was in the other room. Perhaps this was how gay people felt before coming out, she’d thought. You felt like a fraud. Others spoke to you and it seemed like they were offering up their oblivious humanity even if all they were doing was saying, as the English department secretary had, that morning, “By the way, do you have a cat?

We just found out that ours has a kidney condition.” “Poor thing!” Ina had exclaimed. “I do have a cat. It’s so sad when they get sick!” But it sounded in her own ears as if she were ridiculing the secretary, as if neither Ina’s feeling for cats nor even her liking of the secretary was genuine. Ina could understand why her colleague Muriel had come out to Ina and then, forgetting, had come out to her again. One must be accepted for one’s entire self.

One’s sexuality wasn’t something that could be unsnapped like the hood on certain coats. She used to believe it could. “You’ve been apologizing a lot lately,” her mother observed with the starchiness of offended royalty. “I’ve been trying to make some headway with the O’Neill. And then I just need to get out at night.” “Well,” her mother said crisply.

“It’s good you’re doing your work.” “I’m finally having breakthroughs, Ma.” Her mother’s shoulders sagged with relief. “Really, darling?” she said. “You were just spinning your wheels before. This is great news.” After a moment she added, “No one likes to feel like a burden.” “You never are!” Her ears registered how hollow and even ironic her words sounded.

Yet she actually meant them! “Well, get in! Chop chop!” Warmth enfolded Ina in the sedan’s back seat. Opulent afternoon light sank around her, surrounding her with the scent of her mother’s Charlie perfume and her hairspray, a familiar combination that invited Ina to collapse into it like a featherbed. The faded yellow-green cloth back seat was pristine except for, on the back ledge, an umbrella from the Bronx Botanical Garden furled tightly around its polished wood handle, and, on the bench itself, a book of maps of Westchester bearing the absurdly low price of $2.95.

Ina’s parents appeared to her to have shrunk in the past month; the tops of their heads just skimmed the front seat. She felt bad to have fallen hurtfully out of touch. She treasured her mother and had enjoyed speaking with her most evenings. Her mother was canny in ways Ina wasn’t. “Why does the Times need a whole Home section every single week?” Ina once exclaimed, exasperated.

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Copyright © 2026 by Bonnie Friedman First publication 2026 by Europa Editions All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available ISBN 979-8-88966-174-0 Friedman, Bonnie Don’t Stop Cover design by Ginevra Rapisardi Cover image: Ramon Casas, Tired, oil on canvas, 1895-1900. Photo: incamerastock/alamy OceanofPDF.com For Christopher OceanofPDF.com DON’T STOP OceanofPDF.com PART I OceanofPDF.com W CHAPTER 1 hen Ina discovered sex at the age of forty-one, her whole life turned upside down.

She found that she liked things that she didn’t know she could like. Or, to be more precise, she found that she craved to do certain things, and to have certain things done to her, that before this time she would have regarded with mirth and incredulity. Her entire personality had apparently come spring-loaded with a secret compartment in which all sorts of desires lay hidden.

Most people didn’t know their whole character, she now believed. She certainly hadn’t, and she was highly educated and with a wide circle of friends, married at the age of twenty-eight and with a normal dating life before that. Now events that had once struck her as cartoonish or pathetic—a politician caught with a prostitute sucking on his toe, women who wanted to be handcuffed naked to their boyfriend’s bed—didn’t seem so strange. Now she withheld judgment. And it worried Ina to think that she could quite easily have lived her entire life without discovering this hot, disorienting aspect of herself, as if she’d occupied a dim apartment without ever realizing there was a light switch.

It all began late one October afternoon when her friend Janie invited her to a networking event for writers, an open-invitation party for literary types. “You’re home too much. You’re missing all the fun,” said Janie, gesturing toward the city which, from where the two friends sat on the Brooklyn Promenade, resembled a jagged steel honeycomb, the cells of which were brimming with a clear sweetness.

The brake lights on the FDR were just starting to show raspberry in the gathering dusk. Ina smiled. Naturally she didn’t think going to a networking meeting sounded fun.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 47a479e9ff417ac7
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 3,490,984 bytes (3.329 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9798889661740
• Pages: 296
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 477.11 minutes
• Total Words: 95,421
• Total Characters: 544,055
• Average Words per Page: 322.37
• Average Characters per Page: 1838.02

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