“Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.”

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

“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.”

“If my mother was odd enough to crave a bubble bath at three in the morning, Dorothy was inventive enough to suggest adding broken glass to the tub. If my mother insisted on listening to West Side Story repeatedly, it was Dorothy who said, 'Let's listen to it on forty-five!' And when my mother announced that she wanted a fur wrap like Auntie Mame, Dorothy bought her an unstable Norwegian elkhound from a puppy mill.”

“A body in motion tends to stay in motion. (reebok,chiat/day.)Just do it. (Nike, Weiden and Kennedy.)Dammit something just isn't right. (Me, to my bathroom mirror at four thirty in the morning when I'm plastered.)”

“When you say, "I need more confidence," what you're really saying is, "I need those people over there to approve of me."That is the desire to control other people and what they think. The first person who figures out how to do this owns the world.”

“I told myself, 'All I want is a normal life'. But was that true? I wasn't so sure. Because there was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis? I traced my finger along the windowsill. 'Want something normal, want something normal, want something normal', I told myself.”