I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, “Do you believe in God?” “Not really,” he said. “No.””Then why do we come here?”He sucked thoughfully on his Tums tablet and put his arm around me,...

We read off the ancient Hebrew words, with no idea of what they might mean, and the congregation responds with more words that they don’t understand either. We are gathered together on a Saturday morning...

She got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado, the pilot somehow missed the sky.

All of their faces are cluttered with the shrapnel of rebellion, as if a grenade of alienation has exploded in their midst, piercing every possible soft point of flesh-from earlobes and nostrils to eyebrows, lips,...

I lost something after Hailey died. I’m not sure what to call it, but it’s the device that stops ypu from telling the truth when people ask you how you’re doing, that vital valve that...

There’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.

If at first you don’t succeed, lower you expectations

The only thing worse than not having your dream come true is having it come true for a little while.

It’s just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.

At some point, loneliness becomes less a condition than a habit.

Don’t you think if I was able to make some changes, I would have already?

I wasted a lot of time being angry, time I can’t get back. And now I see you, so angry about what happened to your marriage, and I just want to tell you, at some...

I love Hailey and what we have works. Shes’s beautiful, she’s smart, she’s a great mother, and she’s heads above what I ever thought I could see in myself.

Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.

Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don’t share...

…she’ll cry, and if she does, I probably will, and then she’ll have found a way in, and I will not let her pierce my walls in a Trojan horse of sympathy.

We should all just face reality and stop taking our meals together.

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don’t necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on...

It’s an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be...

Love made us partners in narcissism

I was sprawled out in my usual position on the couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing myself by tearing memories out of my mind at random like matches from a book, striking them one...

Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.

I may not be old but I’m too old to have this much nothing

…you realize that you don’t understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.

The tears come to my eyes so fast, there’s just no way to stop them.

And I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, beingangry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoningyourself...

Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it’s true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn’t fade and the scars don’t heal, and it’s too damned late.

Pity, I’ve learned, is like a fart. You can tolerate your own, but you simply can’t stand anyone else’s.