That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

Everyone still deserves to have their say.

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child.

I used to pretend that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one.

What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?

It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.

All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.