Unlike my mother, my father does not cry quietly. His wails roll out like a wave of pain, and I scramble to roll up my window. My mother cannot hear that. I cannot bear to hear it myself. I am not used to my father's crying. I've had no time to harden my heart against him.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me.

I loved to read when I was a kid, and as soon as I realized that an actual person got to make up the books I loved so much, I decided that that was the job for me.

Amazing, Yetta thought. Back home I couldn't have chosen my own husband. And here I'm thinking about choosing presidents, governors, mayors, laws.

...it’d be like looking for a needle in a burning haystack.' 'Oh, I’ve done that,' Mark said airily. 'It’s a game we used to play, after we got rid of all our livestock and didn’t need our hay no more. You throw a match into the haystack, give the fire a three-second head start, and begin looking. You can find the needle every time if you work quick

The sudden silence is horrifying, and it seems to catch my mother off guard. A tiny whimper escapes her, the sound amplified in the stillness. Surely, my father hears her now; surely he and I can't go on pretending she isn't crying.