I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.

Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers.

Maybe I've just read too many novels. In novels, alcoholics are always attractive and fuuny and charming and complex, like Sebastian Flyte or ABe North in Tender in the Night, and they're drinking because of a deep, unquenchable sadness of the soul, or the terrible legacy of the First World War, whereas I just get drunk because I'm thirsty, and I like the taste of lager.

Well, it's so hard for books to take off. You give years of your life to something that probably won't happen, so when it does, it feels a little unjust.

I've been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember.

Mortified at the speed with which intimacy evaporates.

but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.