Imagine if you were the positive pole of a magnet, and you were told that under no circumstances were you allowed to touch that negative pole that was sucking you in like a black hole. Or if you crawled out of the desert and found a woman standing with a pitcher of ice water, but she held it out of your reach. Imagine jumping off a building, and then being told not to fall. That's what it feels like to want a drink.

Life isn't nearly as stable as we want it to be.

For me, every book is a journey - questioning a really difficult topic that most people don't want to talk about, much less write about. And that's what I need; that works for me as a writer.

A heroin-thin boy with enough rings in his eyebrows to resemble a shower curtain rod.

She had never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess.

The first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wond one day and heal the next.

Life could take on any number of shapes while you were busy fighting your own demons. But if you were changing at the same rate as the person beside you, nothing else really mattered. You became each other's constant.