But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts the two concepts are virtually synonymous.

For the first month of school, writing is its own upper. Pounding on my computer keys feels like playing the piano, like arranging words into harmony that sings back to me.

I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings.

Without a bottle to hold, I feel incomplete, the way Plato says we are each born only half a circle, and we spend out lives seeking out our other half. A drink is my beloved. Without it, I am wanting I feel half finished.

I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol. To which I always respond, I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?

I have been a ballerina, a cheerleader and a sorority girl. I was the girliest girl alive.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight...I agree.

There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of mind expansion or warm healing energy. I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet.

My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.

I can’t help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color come up for context. Sink back down for action climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude.

I’ve been thinking I’d like to be Daisy I’d like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me

I dont know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, its always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.