We fell wildly, passionately in love for a number of weeks, and then, in a snap, it was gone - for me, at least.

If you're in wine country, find out where the winemakers eat and go there.

They were the people I modeled myself after because fitting in was easier than sticking out. I wore what they wore, I watched what they watched. I listened to the music they liked, and I screamed at musicians' names because these girls screamed first.

Like prison, I'm never getting out of trouble. The only thing I can do is make my trouble your joy - because here's the thing about reading my memoir: it will make you feel good about yourself. You feel morally superior even as you identify with me. You slip into the supple skin of a cannibal for nearly three hundred pages, and enjoy it; then you can slough it off, go about your happy moral business, and feel like you are a better person.

You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway

This man, this Casimir, which is the name of the young man in question - and it should have told me something, a dirty translation of it means "destroyer of peace" - was nothing to me, a single blip in the Morse code of my life, something too brief to read. He was a phoneme, a dangling modifier, a printer's orphan.

Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk.

I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalistic as a Big Mac. It's not important that it's real. It's only important that it's tasty.

Unlike most other language — which is stored in cerebral cortex, the brain’s center for higher learning — curse words are stored in the limbic system, our most basic, lizard brain level.

Don't believe the lies. Don't believe those lies, anyway. Believe others, if it makes you feel safe. Safety, too, is a lie.