“If you want, we can try to unlock the phone using your dad’s thumb.”

"Do it," I heard myself say.

you can convince someone of 
anything at all

Infidelity is fed to us as sexier when it’s female

All Rachel ever wanted to be was a reality TV star. Rachel didn’t mind which show she ended up on, as long as she became famous and had at least 3 brand deals behind her.

You are so smooth-skinned / I would send your husband / to war to die.

Alice scoops the teeth up and puts them back in her mouth, slipping them into the holes they were ripped from. She is not sure where else they would go.

Is John Doe a writer, or just a content machine?

I ignored it when he admitted he had cheated on all of his girlfriends, and I ignored it when he became quickly angry over something small. I ignored the red flags

I am always talking about the quality of paying attention and the quality of being willing to go into the unknown, being willing to not know. 

I have let love demolish me.

I thought he’d text back “lolz.” Twin tower memes were funny now.

Destroy something for my sake.

Okay, you know how I like to go to the bathroom. We’ve talked about it at sessions over and over again.

writing questions, like

why does he come over in the bad storms

and make excuses not to leave

Mostly we ordered in pizza and put on slow music that looped and stayed on your rug until our pleasures panged together.

“I’m just excited that my first time voting in a presidential election was for a woman,” my daughter said

“yeah,” I said

“that’s so exciting,” I said

On the back of his badge, he had a barcode with which he could change almost anything.

My book is really about loneliness and alienation (like all my favorite books), but politics comes up in it because everyone is obsessed with politics now.

and partly because she went to Yale and married the class president and blasts the socials with pics of their exotic vacations and announcements of their children’s accomplishments

The guy stood up straight as if physically smacked. I ran up behind her and pushed my finger against the inside of my sweatshirt and couldn’t think of anything productive to add so I just yelled, “Yeah!” and hiccuped.

This is what I was waiting for. I all but cry, but I don’t.

He says that’s how all rock stars die.

My sister once said that I was uninteresting because I lacked an original wound.

I said, this, this. Call it what it is.

I was a minor saint of empty time.

Strange men bought me piss poor

beer, spirit forward and blood red

"Mostly I think Spleen is about celebrating our friendship. It's a love that needs to be emphasized more widely rather than romantic love. Spleen is also a fantasy escape that gives us agency in ways we don't have in reality."