I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

She sat in her room on the couch my parents had given up on and worked on hardening herself. Take deep breaths and hold them. Try to stay still for longer and longer periods of time. Make yourself small and like a stone. Curl the edges of yourself up and fold them under where no one can see. ~pg 29, Susie's sister Lindsey dealing with grief.

Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.

Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.

She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything.

In this deeply nuanced portrait of an American family, Bret Anthony Johnston fearlessly explores the truth behind a mythic happy ending. In Remember Me Like This, Johnston presents an incisive dismantling of an all-too-comforting fallacy: that in being found we are no longer lost.

Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?