Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope

In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.

that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep

I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.

During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. Ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.