So between you and me," I tell Justine on the phone that night, "we're either bitchy or stupid." "Oh God," she moans. "Everyone thinks I'm an idiot." "Thanks!

My mother, unlike yours, never exchanged sexual favors for a piece of silver," he said, addressing the first insult by banging the boy's head against the trunk of the tree. "And," he said with another resounding thump, "although I'm very familiar with that part of the female body, I take offense at being labeled one.

I’m scared I’m going to spend the rest of my life in a state of yearning, regardless of where I am.

You're judging her by her literacy," Tara says. "You're a literacist." "You've made that up.

I’m frightened that one morning there will not be enough to keep me going.

It's too late. Seventeen-year-olds don't need fathers. Oh god. I'm thirty-four years old and I need a father. I can't even begin to think what my daughter needs.

Our bodies aren't strangers,' he said, his voice ragged. 'Our spirits aren't strangers'. He held her face in his hands. 'Tell me what part of me is stranger to you and I'll destroy that part of me.' And she wept to hear his words.