People focus on the darker female characters in my books, but for every one of those, I can also show you an equally screwed up man that no one ever comments about, or a nicer woman that no one comments about.

There's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.

I'm a huge fan of ghost stories, that sort of slow build, the suspense and the questioning about whether you're imagining something or if it's real.

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cottonball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified.

What a generous thing that is, I realize, for a husband to try to make his wife laugh.

I assumed everything bad in the world could happen, because everything bad in the world already did happen.

There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.