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.

She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.

The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.

We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

It was as if, before she`d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she`d been before.

Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.