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.

Is the depressing part that he's only half right - it's not that she doesn't need rescuing but that nobody else will be able to do it? She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what's depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder.

High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.

I think that there's some confusion in my own mind about what I believe.

..and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren’t funny.

I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, "I need a little more psychological realism."

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