Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up

Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.

Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.

We'd sit with a big bowl of popcorn, wrapped together in a queen-size blanket, and would escape to a place where magic was ours for the taking, where men rescued the people they loved instead of abandoning them. A place where, no matter how bad things looked at that moment, there would always be a happy ending.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don't understand how I'm going to get from here to there.

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?