..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.

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.

Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person - not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way - I don't think that's exploitive.

I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.

Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you, which... is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when the occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement.

I'm not afraid of writing about sensitive subjects, but I want to be careful how I do so and I know not all readers will think I have been, of course.

I guess I consider myself at times to have intuition.