Can I convince the person about whom I'm crazy to be crazy about me? The short answer is no. The long answer is no.

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

We are savages insides. We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed. There isn't a person reading this who hasn't at one point or another had that why not me? voice pop into the interior mix when something good has happened to someone else.

Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.

If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. There's this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking.

Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here.

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.