I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.

The interesting part about the writing process is that you can never see all the way to the end, not if something is happening over the course of a year and a half, or two years.

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

She told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her roommates and her cute new boyfriend, the classes and the parties and the giggly talks before bed, understanding for the first time that that was her real life now, that this, despite everything she'd ever loved about it, was finished for good.

My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.

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 find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.