I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called 'Pariah.' The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was 'Pariah.' It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.

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.

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

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

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.

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

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.