I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.'