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 think what can be most shameful or embarrassing is when our bodies broadcast a secret we'd prefer no one to know. This is why I hate rashes, in particular face rashes.

The belief that one's suffering has a greater cosmic purpose, and is thus more exciting and more noble, well, it made a lot of sense to me.

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.

People don't hijack planes anymore because that old system of hijacking in order to barter for a prison release or get to a different country no longer works, exactly, because 9/11 recoded the hostage's interpretation of a hijack. If a hijacker isn't trying to use the plane as a missile, then he is in danger of being killed by the hostages. There is no minor terror threat anymore. No mid-level terrorism.

I developed a crazy face rash after I got engaged to a guy I must have known somewhere I should not marry. I hadn't articulated this to myself, so my face told the world instead.

My husband is always accusing me of being a context-free individual. He asks something and he has no idea where it came from or what it related to. I have to supply him with way more supplementary information than I ever have to supply my female friends.