“Aaron met him in New Jersey, coming back from his twice-annual visit to his sister’s in Cherry Hill, and within twenty minutes he’d asked Max to come home—to live.”

“In the spring of 2020, when the lockdown began, Liz still owned the ax that broke down her childhood front door…”

“…my parents’ divorce agreement, a tarot deck, an armadillo that sang a funny song when you squeezed its belly…”

“Much of this is simply a lifelong tendency on my part to notice where the crowd is running and then run in the opposite direction.”

“Upon learning that Louisa May Alcott spent more than a decade moonlighting as a sordid, heady mix of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Brontë, I dove eagerly into this secret canon.”

“The victim is not the person who wakes
in the middle of the night. The victim is not
the person who sleeps until noon.”