What I like about mixing fiction and non-fiction is being able to fully explore an idea without being bound by genre. If you scratch under any surface there are histories for everything, aren't there? And there's unknown women's history in everything, too. It all gets simplified because its complexity is more than you can stand sometimes. So you need full freedom of expression.

Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.

I like being mistaken for someone useful.

Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance.

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.

Love is not a good thing, I've decided. It just makes you afraid you'll lose what you love, and then, because your fear makes a space for that to happen, it does. What's the point?

Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.