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.

If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.

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

I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

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.

Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.