In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It's music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house. Is this some kind of twisted nightmare? The flipping ice cream man, breaking in to chop us all up in our beds to the tune of 'Zippity Do Dah'?... My heart slows. I remember. There is no psycho ice cream man here. It is just our new musical soap dispenser.

When you raise an animal, you live it like your own child.

I could forget that part, but it had to have been true.

Another person is, at the heart of it, unknowable. And if you cannot know a person enough to always guess what they’re capable of, you certainly cannot know them enough to hold them in your hands, to control their behavior, to fight, manipulate, cajole or nurse or soothe them into doing what they should or shouldn’t. People will do what they will do. The trick is admitting your own helplessness about that little fact.

A lot of life is just surviving what happens.

If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.

Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the Queen of Everything, I thought it was a book for adults.