We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.

The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not a different airport.

In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

The secret is that there is no secret.

The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.