It’s a French technique. Soups get screened, and sauces. Forced through a tamis or a chinois. Everything that comes out is smooth and all the rough parts get left behind, thrown away. I don’t want...

Heartbreak is stupid and impossible. Hearts don’t break. Hearts squeeze, they wrench, they ache, they shrivel. Hearts pull apart in wet chunks like canned tomatoes.

This is home, it’s the only place I want to be, but at the same time everything familiar feels strange. It’s the same as it ever was except without the people who most belong here.

She’s not quite making sense, but no one does all the time.

I find the title How to Be Good. Curious, I open it up. I’m disappointed to find it’s fiction.

One of my professors in college used to say As the wise man said, Do or do not, there is no try, but the advice columns generally say the opposite. If someone promises to try,...

there is something intriguing about knowing how things are going to turn out, but being constantly surprised about how they’ll get there.

I preferred to think of myself as a cat. If I think of my behavior as cat behavior instead of people behavior, it pretty much always makes sense.

I tell myself I’m fine on my own, but am I? No friends to fall back on, no relationships, no support. Left to my own devices, I have no devices.

Everybody struggles with this stuff, you know. With social discomfort and grief and fitting in. People with syndromes, people with disorders, people with diagnoses, and without. People who would be classified as neurotypical. Idiots and...

I let myself relax into the pattern of the recipe.

But I can’t force everything into the arrangement I’d like. I can’t use denial to make everything simple.

It preoccupies me until it’s time to leave. It seems such the right expression of grief. I am sad, so in whatever small way I can, I will tear myself apart. They’ve taken what’s on...

I want them to bite into a cookie, and think of me, and smile. Food is love. Food has a power. I knew it in my mind, but now I know it in my heart.

All I have besides food is grief.

His voice is muddy, that’s what it is. Dark and brown and muddy. A note to it like coffee left too long on the burner. And unsweetened, bitter chocolate. But there’s dirt in it too,...

I will take a new approach to death, because what is important about death is not the dead. It’s the living. Those of us left behind.

The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up. Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to...

If you don’t know how to deal with emotion, other people’s feelings can hit you like a drug.

Difficult, but not impossible. I am not impossible.

My world had turned upside down again and again, which should mean it’s right side up now, but it isn’t. Everything’s different, everything’s the same.

I’m completely out of control, and I can hear the beginnings of the chant, get/out/, but now that I’m not being touched maybe I can master it and I shut the world out: separating an...