We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.

All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

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

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?

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.