I realized I could really become hooked on these happy pills. They gave me a glorious feeling of general well-being and didn't make me fat, like alcohol. I wondered if there was any harm in being addicted to only these.

It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?

Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.

With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it. Everything I write is the truth and I know that I would win.

New York City is a place where you can lock yourself up in your little studio apartment, and not go outside at all, and not feel in the slightest guilty about it.

There's not enough of me left over.

Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping.