I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She...

I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.

Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women’s hat makers or...

Everyone who keeps a secret, itches to tell it.

I don’t understand the point of being together if you’re not the happiest.

They thought more before nine a.m. than most people thought all month. I remember once declining cherry pie at dinner, and Rand cocked his head and said, ‘Ahh! Iconoclast. Disdains the easy, symbolic patriotism.’ And...

There will be days you wish you’d never done it. And thosewill be the good times, when it’s only days of regret and notmonths.

How confusing to live in the shadow of a shadow.

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it. I drank more and continued my mantra. ‘Stop thinking’, swig, ’empty your head’, swig, ‘now, seriously empty your head’.

Libby wasn’t a big talker – Michelle and Debby seemed to hog all her words. She made pronouncements: I like ponies. I hate spaghetti. I hate you. Like her mother, she had no poker face....

I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that, too, but I wouldn’t...

New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing...

I’m just tired of people judging me because I fit into a certain mold.

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...