It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.

I write about kids growing up, I write a lot about schools and parents, and all of my experiences with those things have been suburban experiences.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.

To this day, she’s still sad. Because there’s not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I’m just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn’t hurt me at all.

I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.

It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.