I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints.

I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, "Did you have electricity, Mom?" and I was like okay, enough, kid.

Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.

A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.

No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.