I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.

My family suffered. My hair turned up in every corner, every drawer, every meal. Even in the rice puddings Tessie made, covering each little bowl with wax paper before putting it away in the fridge--even into these prophylactically secure desserts my hair found its way! Jet black hairs wound themselves around bars of soap. They lay pressed like flower stems between the pages of books. They turned up in eyeglass cases, birthday cards, once--I swear--inside an egg Tessie had just cracked. The next-door neighbor's cat coughed up a hairball one day and the hair was not the cat's.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

To start with, look at all the books.

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.