I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.

To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.

But you know what they say about Gutshot: the population never goes up and never goes down, because every time a woman gets pregnant, a man leaves town.

No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.

The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.

I mean, I am pretty fabulous. Am I not?' 'You're a pillar of fabulosity in the community,' I tell him.

Writing does not resurrect. It buries.