she got a reputation for an easy smile and a sharp tongue, and using one to balance the other, she seemed friendly but distant

Hunger makes you restless. you dream about food - not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream.

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.

Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.