Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics.

It’s not like I planned it. I never woke up from some rosy dream and said, “Okay, world, today I’m gonna spaz.

She also understood there was a hole in her heart where her son should be, that she was a wicked, selfish woman for wishing him back.

She was no stripper with a heart of gold, that was for sure. A heart of steel, more like.

We didn’t want to admit it then, but we were friends. Best friends.

I hung a picture of him above my bed and learned by hand the internal workings of the female combustion engine.

You’re saying, “What the hell am I gonna do with her?” You’re saying, “Shit, did she take her pills?” You’re saying, “Once upon a time, I used to have a little girl.

Writing is a solitary business. It’s just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill.

I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something…or something.

A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.

Using one’s beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that’s how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife.

Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells...

Okay, I’ll just jump right out and say it. I have anxiety issues.

Just five minutes, God, I chant like some hostage negotiator on the brink of a resolution. Five minutes alone. Please, please. Please.

When I was twenty-something, I asked my father, “When did you start feeling like a grownup?” His response: “Never.

The bottom line was that I was in an abusive relationship.

I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.

Cuz I can count on one hand the men who’ve loved me, not in the Biblical sense—I don’t have enough digits for that—but who have truly loved me.

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing--and reading--is a solitary business. And it’s good to know I’m not alone.

Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.

Wine and a straitjacket. That pretty much sums it up.

If she could hate this much she sure as hell had loved.

My sister and I are so close that we finish each other’s sentences and often wonder who’s memories belong to whom.

Once upon a long ago time I was a girl with hopeful halos in my eyes—not unlike you—not a typical beauty but beautiful nonetheless, as all young girls tend to be in their prime, even if they don’t tend to know it.

All I cared about that summer were suntans, beaches, boys and booze.

Don’t worry if you fall, sweet girl. Youth is made for bruises.

Sometimes, I feel my breath coming in shorter, quicker, spastic bursts, feel my heart threaten to thunder through my ribs, feel sweat beading on my brow...and I know it’s time to bust out those “chocolate frogs” from Harry Potter.

Of course, I rationalize the fear. I realize it’s not real, that my house isn’t burning down, that the deer aren’t going to kill me.

Water. Like a blanket. Dark. Intoxicating. Cold.

She didn't tell him white folks couldn't love the same as coloreds. She couldn't love the same neither though, cuz more than half of her was white.

Jeb'd said it was harder for a pretty girl to find work; even white men liked flowers, whether red or pink or blue.

I could say it all began with my mother.

She fantasized sometimes too about killing him a little: a little poison in his pudding, a little flick-flick-flick with a fillet knife at his throat.

Her mother always told her, “If he hits you, then you leave,” but Jack had never hit her, not with his fists.

I’m sorry if...I get too personal, if I make you uncomfortable, but writing is like one of the seven deadly sins, like Sharing on Mr. Rogers, and once you get the bug you’re trapped in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe forever.

Mama wasn't dead...exactly. They all said she was, but when Elma was small, she seen Mama creep into her room at night, half-naked, head all bloodied red like when they found her by the well that day, and Elma reckoned dead just meant pretendin' you couldn't move or breathe until nightfall when you got up and walked around like you was free.

Here’s a random factoid: I like cats. And here’s another: I like red wine.

Amber Rorman had told me too that our third grade teacher, Ms. Lizetti, was really a lesbian, which I thought was a disease until I asked Amber and Amber told me to ask her mother who told me to ask my mother, who said, “Lesbians are women who like to have sex with other women,” which I didn’t think was all that weird.

Let’s call my mood melancholy; let’s call it remembrance. Or maybe let’s call it longing. Yes, let’s call it longing instead.

You’re worried about what-ifs. Well, what if you stopped worrying?

It wasn’t as if she’d thought it through or anything, how what a person wanted wasn’t always what they needed, and what a person needed might be the last thing they could ever want.

Through career fumbles and life changes, she supported me. Through shattered dreams and hopes almost-realized, she supported me too.