Quotes from Heidi Julavits

I spend far too much time on eBay buying lamps and upholstery remnants.

As such, anything is always possible, even if your protagonist is a plumber. But it's the possibility, the limitless possibilities, of any fake life, that make writing about it so challenging.

I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person's identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.

When my husband first read a draft, he said, "You spend too much time describing the characters' outfits." He was right. I removed much of the clothes talk, but quite a bit remained.

We want to believe we couldn't be replaced, and that the people we love are irreplaceable.

I love this idea of the body as a trauma archive!

I wouldn't be myself if I weren't always trying to be someone else. I only have so much time on this earth and I want to be as many people as possible.

Whether I'm writing about plumbers or psychics or psychic plumbers, I want to find a creative space that imprisons me usefully, so I can deviate with purpose.

You should never read online comments if you want to keep thoughts above the belt.

I needed to understand this random bad bit of luck as part of a bigger design. Otherwise I was suffering meaninglessly. This made the suffering a lot worse.

I don't think women are, by definition, toxic to one another. I think women are simultaneously competitive toward and idolatrous of each other. I thrive on that challenge and that desire.

This story is meant to make you realize that your chances of happiness in this world are terribly slim if you lack a fine imagination.

A white girl disappears from a white prep school in a white suburb. Nobody knows what happened to her. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened. This must be resolved by whatever means possible.

We are multiple beings having a dubious experience

Life, my dear, is not about romance. The sooner you learn that, the less of a disappointment yours will prove to be.

and maybe it was the spirit of her dead mother sickening her, or maybe it was her inability to grieve a person she should, by biological rights, have grieved, but as with so many diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.

Alwyn's beauty came and went depending on how much sleep she'd had, or how much water she'd drunk, or how many people she'd annoyed that day, and this made a person want to keep examining her face because it was never the same.

These people," she said. "These people who die and you never knew them. What are you supposed to feel?" She really wanted me to tell her. She really thought that I would know. "Nothing," I said, tossing the key on her bed. "You're not supposed to feel anything.

People accuse therapists of seeing abuse where there isn't any; of fabricating memories for their patients. Maybe this is true. But if so, it's because neurosis without a perceptible cause is very hard to accept. How does one fix a problem that arose from nothing?

Alwyn's mother could not square her identity as a sexualized woman with that of being a mother

In parks, when people veer from the established paths and cut new ones through the grass, these are called "desire lines." Many people have the same desire when it comes to walking, which implies that we all want to get to the same place, and more quickly.

In most couples there is the person who wins and the person who doesn't. The winner isn't necessarily stronger or smarter or righter. The winner is the person who won't give up, and the non-winner ("loser" is not the correct word for the person who does not win), at a certain point, realizes the battle is a silly one, and the spoils are not worth the extended warfare.

The Googling that might occur before dinner parties, however, confuses me more than the Googling of dead wives, especially since I prefer to have dinner parties where nobody talks about their careers. Isn't that the mark of a failed dinner party? When the conversations resemble job interviews? Wouldn't it actually be preferable, thus, to request that everyone Google the other guests beforehand so our tedious biographies won't need teasing out in person?

Because the doctors could not cure me, they decided I could not be sick. They told me it was all in my head. Namely, I was to blame. I was the sickness.