It's not that I literally think I'm a fearie. It's just that I feel so different from most people. And this idea of a race living underground in caverns, spending all their days dancing and playing the fiddle and eating flowers and reciting poetry and sharing their dreams, that to me sounds much more real than the way people live in this world, hating and fighting and wanting and hurting.

Any alphabet book for children where 'P is for Patti' Smith and 'X is for the women whose names we don't know' is something I can recommend, especially when the book is as well written, representationa lly diverse and vividly illustrated as this one.

Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.

She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.

Writing is literally transformative. When we read, we are changed. When we write, we are changed. It's neurological. To me, this is a kind of magic.

It's not that I literally think I'm a fearie. It's just that I feel so different from most people. And this idea of a race living underground in caverns, spending all their days dancing and playing the fiddle and eating flowers and reciting poetry and sharing their dreams, that to me sounds much more real than the way people live in this world, hating and fighting and wanting and hurting.

No matter where I am, I am always loving you.