Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.

"I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies-a cypress age, a Sawtooth age-I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.