If you chose to go into someone else’s reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.
This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.
Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was an immaculate anonymity.
Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend, or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of is had needed it.
I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.
That I wanted more. That night I dreamed of kissing her again and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.
I fell in love with you again; While you were away – Jack Salmon.
I like gardening – it’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.
It’s hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you’re ultimately the author, so you do have control.
You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.
I’m not a slash-and-burn kind, and I’m also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It’s like walking down the street – what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.
Last night it had been my father who had finally said it: “She’s never coming home.” A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it.
To transform experience and thought into language and narrative – that is beautiful even if that beauty is in brokenness.
Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.
Depending on where I am in the process, sometimes I have a page count and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I have an hour count; sometimes I’m just happy to string a few words together. I do keep pretty rigorous hours, because otherwise you never get anything done.
She didn’t even have to smile, and she rarely did outside her house – it was the eyes, her dancer’s carriage, the way she seemed to deliberate over the smallest movement of her body.
How could it be that you could love someone so much and keep it secret from yourself as you woke daily so far from home?
Well, it’s my voice, so it’s more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it’s very different from writing fiction.
There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.
I stared at her black hair. It was shiny like the promises in magazines.