I have a very low eerie threshold.

I run my hands through his hair, finally, finally, finally, then bring his head to mine and kiss him so hard our teeth collide, planets collide, kissing him now for each and every time we...

grief is a housewhere the chairshave forgotten how to hold usthe mirrors how to reflect usthe walls how to contain usgrief is a house that disappearseach time someone knocks at the dooror rings the bella...

This is how he came out: he floated into the air high above the sleeping forest, his green hat spinning a few feet above his head. In his hand was the open suitcase and out...

When I wear her clothes, I just feel safer, like she’s whispering in my ear.

I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It’s definitely one of my greatest joys, and I’m a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.

I’m thinking the reason I’ve been so quiet all those years is only because Brian wasn’t around yet for me to tell everything to.

And even as I’m kissing him and kissing him and kissing him, I wish I were kissing him, wanting more, more, more, more, like I can’t get enough, never will be able to get enough.

,Cómo voy asobrevivir a esta añoranza? ,Cómo lo hacen otros? La gente muereconstantemente. Todos los días. A todas horas. Hay familias por todo elmundo mirando camas donde ya no duerme nadie, zapatos que ya nadie...

Isn’t that what I always think when I get The Poor Motherless Girl Look? Like I’ve been shoved out of the airplane without a parachute because mothers are the parachutes.

I’m in self-imposed exile, cradled between split branches, in my favorite tree in the woods behind school. I’ve been coming here every day at lunch, hiding out until the bell rings, whittling words into the...

I was actually born in New York, and spent some of my childhood in Boston. But my family moved to San Diego when I was 12, and I went to high school here.

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will...

In photographs of us together, she is always looking at the camera, and I am always looking at her.

You have to see the miracles for there to be miracles.

Y hay que ver, esos libros sobre el duelo son unamierda, todos iguales, una porquería total al cien por cien.

She’s a sun-kissed beach girl who goes gothgrungepunkhippierockeremocoremetalfreakfashionistabraingeekboycrazyhiphoprastagirl to keep it under wraps.

As I walk through the redwood trees, my sneakers sopping up days of rain, I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes, when grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe.

Second novels are bears. As are other people’s expectations for them. I think taking the time you need with the second book is key. Writers spend years and years on their first novels and then...

Remember how it was when we kissed? Armfuls and armfuls of light thrown right at us. A rope dropping down from the sky. How can the word love and the word life even fit in...

I notice he doesn’t have his meteorite bag and see out the window it’s probably going to pour any minute, but wee need to et out of here. Immediately. “We’re going to search for meteorites,”...

How could a mother who boils water for pasta leave two little girls behind?

The guy’s life drunk, I think, makes Candide look like a sourpuss. Does he even know that death exists?

I look into his sorrowless eyes and a door in my heart blows open. And when we kiss, i see that on the other side of that door is sky.

SELF PORTRAIT: Throwing Armfuls of Air into the Air

When people fall in love, they burst into flames.

Love does as it undoes. It goes after with equal tenacity: joy and heartbreak. Her happiness was his unhappiness and that’s the unfair way it was.

She’s a people-mechanic and always knows when I’m malfunctioning.

I have an impulse to write all over the orange walls- I need an alphabet of endings ripped out of books, of hands pulled off of clocks, of cold stones, of shoes filled with nothing...

Let me just unsubscribe to my own mind already, because I don’t get any of it.

Portrait: The Boy with All the Keys in the World with All the Locks

People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn’t. It continues and is ever-changing.

They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all. They go like this.

Reality is crushing. The world is a wrong-sized shoe. How can anyone stand it?

I do find the sibling connection endlessly fascinating, as I do all family dynamics. I like how siblings seem to create their own parentless mini-civilization within a family, one that has its own laws, myths,...

What if I’m in charge of my own damn light switch?

Maybe what my sister wanted was to stay here and get married and have a family.Maybe that was her color of extraordinary.

Life’s a freaking mess. In fact, I’m going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because...

My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns...

It was right and wrong both. Love does as it undoes. It goes after, with equal tenacity, joy and heartbreak.

For me, there’s nothing better than getting immersed in a sprawling, epic, multi-generational family saga, and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the most sprawling, epic, and multi-generational of them all.

The.World.Is.Not.A.Safe.Place.

And it’s just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there’s no overlap.

This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect...

I can’t shove the dark out of my way.

Sadness pulses out of us as we walk. I almost expect the trees to lower their branches when we pass, the stars to hand down some light. I breathe in the horsy scent of eucalyptus,...

I am insanely superstitious. All the woman in my family are, beginning with my grandmother, who would leave red ribbons under the beds and taught us how to find four-leaf clovers.

I’d been making desicions for days.I picked out the dress Bailey would wear forever-a black slinky one- innapropriate- that she loved.I chose a sweater to go over it, earrings, bracelet, necklace, her most beloved strappy...

Qué más da cómo lo llamen los demás —dice—. Esta es nuestrahistoria y la contamos como queremos.Es nuestra historia y la contamos como queremos. Se diría que contodo lo que leo esto se me debería...

That’s a misconception, Lennie. The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.