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.

Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

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.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

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.

From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.