How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky?

I'd come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival

You drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, that was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.

I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic, post-comet, post-whatever it was, so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid, that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to.

I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.

I had no sympathy for drama queens.

A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It's the kind of place that leaves a mark.