Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?

I think of that, too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and...

A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.

I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the...

Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the announcement of the word as you sift your brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the...

And sometimes drunk women aren’t raped; they just make stupid choices–and to say we deserve special treatment when we’re drunk because we’re women, to say we need to be looked after, I find offensive.

Wenn man meine Seele zeichnen könnte, wäre es irgendein wildes Gekritzel mit deutlich sichtbaren Reißzähnen.

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child’s boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be...

Things might not be great, but things would be okay.

If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we’d all have a very Merry Christmas, I heard my aunt Diane boom in my head. Those words had been the bane of my childhood, a constant...

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

And I think, “I’m so fucking lonely”. I go home and cry for a while. I am almost 32. That’s not old especially in New York. But the fact is it has been years since...

I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this … I still love scribbling the word – WRITER – any time on a form, questionnaire, document asks for my occupation. Fine, I write...

what are you thinking, Amy? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we ddone to each other? What will we do?

Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions....

People have to do awful things for money.

All of a sudden you see reading in bed and waffles on Sunday and laughing at nothing and his mouth on yours. And it’s so far beyond fine that you know you can never go...

Sometimes I think I won’t ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand.

I feel like Amy wanted people to believe she really was perfect. And as we got to be friends, I got to know her. And she wasn’t perfect. You know? She was brilliant and charming...

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else.

Soul mates. They really call themselves that, which makes sense, because I guess they are … They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride though life like conjoined jellyfish –...

At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me...

…an old guy with a Hemingway beard and the build of a girl.

I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don’t even ripple.

I still believed he’d love me again somehow, love me that intense, thick way he did, the way that made everything good.

I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won’t make that mistake again.

She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

I always feel sad for the girl that I was, because it never occurred to me that my mother might comfort me. She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she...

My dad had limitations. That’s what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.

Bang bang bang. I understand now why so many horror movies use that device-the mysterious knock on the door-because it has the weight of a nightmare. You don’t know what’s out there, yet you know...

You’re sexist. I’m so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guide of protecting women against sexual discrimination.

I’d developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me seem like a dick – my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing...

It is always consoling to think of suicide;it’s what gets one through many a bad night.

Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. The other morning I woke up next to her, and I studied the back of her skull. I tried to read her thoughts. For once I didn’t...

One should never marry a man who doesn’t own a decent set of scissors.

Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial – you’d think all women do is clean and bleed.

I don’t feel the need to explain my actions to her. I don’t clarify, I don’t doubt, I don’t worry. I don’t tell her everything, not anymore, but I tell her more than anyone else,...

Och när man sedan håller på att köpa tärnad cantaloupemelon på Sjunde Avenyn råkar man få syn på Nick Dunne, och pang, där är någon som känner en, någon som känner igen en. Och det...

She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public was a beloved child. She’d parade me into town, smiling and teasing me, tickling me as she spoke with people...

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as to my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood...

I didn’t think past the first step of anything, that was the key. I drank a Coke and didn’t worry about how to recycle the can or about the acid puddling in my belly, acid...

The old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy … a razor-wire...

Like walking through a door. Our relationship immediately attained a sepia tone: the past.

I know a little bit about trying to do the right thing and fucking up completely.” I added.”You talking about mom?” Ben said”I was talking about me.””You could have been talking about all of us....

…my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks,...

Back in grade school, my shrinks tried to channel my viciousness into a constructive outlet, so I cut things with scissors. Heavy, cheap fabrics Diane bought by the bolt. I sliced through them with old...

I am overachieving at aimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the leader of a gang of heartbroken kids, running wild across this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from the betrayals of...

I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed,...

E pensei: o amor faz você querer ser um homem melhor – certo, certo. Mas talvez amor, amor de verdade, também lhe de a permissão para ser apenas o homem que é.

The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes. I speak specifically of the Amy of today, who was only remotely like the woman I fell in love with. It had been...