“I couldn't help but think, This car is taking me to a mental hospital and my mother is treating it like open-mic night at a Greenwich Village café.”

“My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car.”

“Dennis's superior mental health was obvious from the first date, like a cleft palate. The other thing about him was that he had shapely, muscular legs. His calves were so sculpted they looked artificial, like silicone implants. This is a look I'm fond of. In fact, if I had been born a girl there is no doubt in my mind that my chest cavity would have been stuffed with two softball-sized orbs of silicone before my eleventh birthday. In this way my own mental health is somewhat like a cleft palate.”

“Dorothy viewed my mother's propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish.'Your mother is just expressing herself,' Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen. No, she's not,' I would say. 'She's going insane again.' Don't be so mundane,' she would yawn, passing my mother a shoebox filled with cat vertebrae. 'She is a brilliant artist. If you want Hamburger Helper, go find some other mother.”

“In the middle of the conversation, I open a third ale. I cup my hand over the mouthpiece so they don't hear the tab of the ale being popped. It dawns on me that this is a slightly contrary action. Like stopping into Baby Gap before having an abortion.”

“Fairness is not among the laws of the universe. This means, if someone runs over your foot in a car and they don't stop , that's just too bad and it totally sucks and you better bust your ass to get yourself to the hospital right now so they can save the foot.”

“My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. ”