He was only Jack. Never daddy.

We found ourselves in Kohl’s a few months later. I was home for the holidays, and Mom and I were standing in the women’s department, staring at shelves of bargain business casual.

The human race was absurd and overwrought. Men were feeble-minded narcissists and women, acoustic blowhorns with an endless flurry of wind.

your uncle has a whiteboard on his wall and on it it says TO DO: TELL TERRY YOU LOVE HER. he wrote that you don’t know how many years ago. terry was his girlfriend but she’s dead now

Against cloudless skies, any of the available disorders are at your disposal.

I swore off intimacy for a long time and tried to replicate the feeling with a heating pad, a body pillow, and a vibrator but ended up most nights just crying in bed with a bottle of vodka.

I said to Martin Amis once, told him Augie March is a jazz beat novel and he said his son reckons that 

I felt like a fool in the rain as I sat under the shower head.

Now she wore a menacing permutation of the cheerful, customer-service smile he had seen her display earlier.

Molly, in its three hundred and twelve pages, transcends time and space, life and death.

The seductress in my head smiled and said “What else am I not allowed to talk about, Avery?”

But we were just going to be friends.

Say thank you
for what they’ve done: the late night call
to AAA, the five spot for a hot dog, the cups
of coffee & scones

The fantasies I’ve been having
Are so awful

and what’s the point, really, of casual sex, except to melt the ghosts off someone’s face

We slithered up toward the moaning highway and saw it was being tongued by stretched headlights.

When reciting the Ten Plagues in Hebrew, we customarily dip our knives into our wine glass for each plague and set a drop of wine on our dinner plate.

There’s not a thought in the throb. Not an inkling in the coppery clatter of his mouth. There’s only the turn. Only the fist: fast, everything behind it.

She thought he was going to kill her this time, but that was one of the unspoken rules: no killing each other. Also: no kitchen knives, no purpose-built weapons of any kind. No screaming, either. Neighbors, the police—they wouldn’t understand.

My mother’s screams woke me up.

I have come to teach you love / and the solitude that comes / with ultimate strength.

In late July, in the mid-nineties, I begged Mom and her fiancé Paul to buy me a big ball at Roses department store.

Showboat said he'd like to take me out sometime. I asked why.

“Because I think you’re attractive, and so we can hang out somewhere other than the coffee trailer,” he said.

It was October, ten

I'm sure a terrible something has occurred at every inhabitable coordinate. 

I got my period the moment we got to the hotel. Getting my period wasn’t going to affect any of my plans, and was no big deal, really, aside from the fact that I refuse to pay attention to my body so am always completely surprised when my period comes. As such, I had brought no supplies to Miami with me.

in the middle of the night i will sit on your leg on a swivel chair, watching your favorite music videos, galvanizing our similarities. we transport ourselves into the future.

One morning on McSweeney’s there was an announcement about a new literary festival in Philadelphia organized by Neal Pollack. It was going to be called the 215 Festival (named after the city’s area code) and would feature readings by Dave and Zadie and Matthew Klam and Neal, as well as other young, McSweeney’s type writers.