She wanted out of the decorating scheme.

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

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

Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.