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 am simply looking for a companion with whom to spend my days, a companion who will cherish as much as I the stupidity of living in the moment, and spend every dull, amazing second with me.

I wish somebody knew whether or not I'm Jewish.

A white girl disappears from a white prep school in a white suburb. Nobody knows what happened to her. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened. This must be resolved by whatever means possible.

When you are expending much energy on someone else's demise, it's like you weaken your psychic immune system.

There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft and I'm nowhere near done.

I have a daughter who, when younger, possessed no barrier between her emotional self and the outside world. Her emotional insides spilled out all over, and, especially when I was sleep-deprived and probably a little paranoid, this really threatened me. It was as if she were embodying and expressing the insecurities and freaked-outedness I never express, and which I've learned over the years to keep hidden.