"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"

She didn't even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house--it was the eyes, her dancer's carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.

It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.

Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength.

No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.