Except it’s not the light that causes me pain. It’s the darkness. I can hardly step out in the sun at all anymore, let alone stare at it. Cancer. The sun hates us, you know.… More

Except it’s not the light that causes me pain. It’s the darkness. I can hardly step out in the sun at all anymore, let alone stare at it. Cancer. The sun hates us, you know.… More

If you’re going to be a serious writer, you MUST read widely outside your “genre.” Classics, the ancient Greeks, poetry, experimental stuff. Everything, all the time. That way you’re not just regurgitating what other writers in your lane are doing.… More
Easier to be chosen than to choose. Jenni knows this. She pulls us through the day on an invisible leash—her grandmother’s birthday, a trailer park, a couch that looks like an orange muppet—until there’s no edges left.… More
My life involves precision. Observation. Balance. Not everyone can keep it up. That’s why they falter. That’s why they leave shaken. Because they glimpse the truth. That everything they call leisure is, in fact, duty. To live well is to work without end.… More
Like my first public memory, which is probably of The Challenger exploding and not of the time that I saw Lindsay Farr’s vagina in eighth grade, which was public but not the sort of thing that probably qualifies as “public writ large”… More
At your second one-year cake, you lamented the suffering you had put everyone through, but boy, had you not even started yet.… More
It’s none of her damn business, but it’s nice she’s acting like a mother. Annoying but normal-annoying. Better than her crying alone on the couch, like a decaying potato, oozing in the darkness.… More
If life had a reset button, I wish my father had beat the hell out of me.… More
I was ready to negotiate with terrorists. Or at least my boyfriend.… More
Her face glowing the ruby of the cabernet and with shame—the shame of asking, worrying about her seam, but too afraid to touch it. What if it has dried up? With a few more lessons on seduction, could it be a desert gulch in a flash flood?… More
I held my violet fingernails up to my stubble and rhinestone stud earrings and said, I’m not exactly what most people have in mind when they hear positive male role model.… More