“Returning home after her divorce, she moves through airport crowds, her grandmother’s house, and the tight choreography of conversation with her mother—love expressed through food, folded clothes, silence, and superstition.”

“That me is far from what you know. That me is dead. There’s no comfort in this. And there’s the fear that this me you see, raging and electric, will be dead someday, too.”

“In my mind I played the image of him and the visual artist, their long limbs entangled, his hand on her throat, his eyes on her contorted face, his other hand kneading her heavy breasts.”

“Even as she thought it, she knew it was impossible to make everything overlap in a way that satisfied her.”

“To some of us who sat with Mike at lunch every day, Shit Plate felt like a good thing that we were doing, like charity work.”

“I don’t know what the break-in meant to me at the time, but it was like a stray thread, a thread that, once I tugged upon it, unspooled my entire world and snagged open a portal through which I could escape.”