Are you mine?” Yes. “Are you mine?” Yes. “Are you mine?” No. “No?” No. I loved being yours. But now I’m mine, which is all I ever was, in the end.

This boy has negative charisma. He walks into a room and the oxygen starts to evaporate. I guess that's why girls sleep with him. They find his awfulness transfixing. He's like a lousy 1970's disaster movie that they can't bring themselves to turn off, even though it is making their life worse every minute they leave it on.

What people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head, you don't know where they could go.

Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.

He was only twenty-five.He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss-the one that is happening as you feel it.

It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.

It's all in her walk, a cartoon swagger. Part Jayne Mansfield, part Muhammad Ali. Men never know if it's an invitation upstairs or an invitation outside.