My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it’s faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.

it was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.

The only monsters I have ever known were men.

After all, the only way to communicate is to find someone who can comprehend; the only way to be forgiven is to find someone who is willing to forgive.

And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it's gone, so are you.

When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point taht wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.