I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.

The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.

This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.

And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.

You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.