With friends, if you keep making an effort to reach out and you keep getting hurt, you eventually stop trying. But it's much harder to give up on family. Somewhere deep down you want it to work so badly that you keep making the same mistake over and over again.

When a marriage fails, the story of the relationship changes. The best parts, the parts that made you think getting married was a good idea, fade from memory.

We are not defined by the family into which we are born, but the one we choose and create. We are not born, we become.

Everybody knows there is no such thing as normal. There is no black-and-white definition of normal. Normal is subjective. There's only a messy, inconsistent, silly, hopeful version of how we feel most at home in our lives.