... nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.

Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.

If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience. You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off; you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you.

Obviously the bar is much higher now for a behavior to be scandalous. Social media has really changed the way people live. It's not a new impulse; it's just being enacted in a new way.

I gave people the benefit of the doubt, thinking, so many people that appear very calm and even boring must have all these wild emotions and crazy ideas.

In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.

She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.