Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.

My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.

I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.