...subtitled it 'Everything you Always Wanted to Know About Driving Out to Remote Locations in the Upper Midwest to Find your Childhood Imaginary Friend but Were Afraid to Ask.

If being a girl is a frontier all its own, what is the manifest destiny?

The fact that Nellie wasn't any one person but rather a composite of three of the real Laura's antagonists' worst traits makes her even more terrifying, some kind of blond Frankenstein assembled from assorted bitch parts.

I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around under all the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me.

The little room was full of ordinary things that had already become precious, that I couldn't help but want to have again, to feel like whoever it was I used to be, whether it was my past or someone else's.