When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.

The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

It turned out to be impossible for me to 'run away' in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.