Philip Galanes has fashioned a novel both bleak and funny about a young man's struggle to sort out his troubled love: the too-strong love for his mother, the too-weak love for his suicidal father, and the all-consuming love of anonymous sexual encounters. Pointed and acute, this story tells of the narrator's many betrayals of others and their many betrayals of him. It exists in an uncomfortable moral space where the humor of terrible things sometimes outweighs, but never obscures, their poignancy.

Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.

Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron ... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.

One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.

The idea of anyone contemplating our family and witnessing the affection that we all have for one another and seeing evil in it is deeply hurtful and sad; and also deeply bewildering.

I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn’t lead, their jobs I couldn’t do - overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.

I really feel that the Church leaders have blood on their hands. I feel that there are gay Mormons who have committed suicide or whose lives have been destroyed because of the attitude of the Church.