You know you're screwed when a Western doctor recommends acupuncture.

If I'd done the discovery before I wrote the book, then there would be nothing to discover. It would feel dutiful instead of exciting.

Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.

I surround myself with women who inspire me to be more ambitious, and who constantly astonish me with their magnetism, style, and smarts.

I like playing with a popular cliché and making it my own by half-embracing it, half-disemboweling it.

We want to believe we couldn't be replaced, and that the people we love are irreplaceable.

Every once in a while when I get a migraine, I like to think, "Who hates me today?"