I tried to avoid Mimi. Her presence seemed to call forth every rejection I'd ever experienced-the teachers who'd looked at me as though I held no promise, the boys who didn't like me back. Around her, I became fourteen again.

It might sound ordinary for a woman to find out her husband's cheating on her, but not if you're the woman and it's your husband.

He said, "People wait their whole lives for the kind of happiness we have.

The only relationships I haven't wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later.

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.

The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.