“Yet she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t stop writing. She was like a medium receiving messages from the dead.”

“Sitting down in the evenings became a kind of torture, a bleak realization of her talents laid out against the bright shimmering fabric of her dreams. Yet she couldn’t stop, she couldn’t give up so easily. To stop writing completely produced in her a bleak and relentless depression, so she stubbornly persisted, plodding through endless drafts and revisions, telling herself she was learning something each time.”

“It was one way she had found to fill her solitary childhood, but it was more than that; the act of creation gave substance and shape to her life. It made order out of the chaos.”

“Death smoothes the rough edges, obliterates the cruelties of the deceased. It makes heroes of monsters.”

“I can’t just open myself up the way some people can. And down here, you’re raised a certain way. You’re taught to keep some things private, family matters especially. It’s just the way it’s done.""Everyone worships the past but no one really wants to talk about it.”

“Everyone has a different story, and you have to ask yourself what motivates people to see reality the way they do.”

“A child’s bond to her mother cannot be understated, and my bond with Helen was a ragged, baffling, disheartening, chaotic mess. I felt crazy, often, around my own mother. I grew up questioning what was normal, asking what reality was and wasn’t, and not trusting the outcome of different situations. She scared me and I couldn’t predict her behavior, so I was often off-kilter and worried.”