Why was I so confused? It's all so easy.

Whoever invented donuts must be a genius, thought the little girl. Lily had two problems, losing her dad to cancer and a craving for sugar. She was only aware of one of them because daddy was just gone, not gone forever. The concept of irreversible death was a little too complicated for the 7-year-old to understand just yet. So, she set out to solve the second problem. There was a quaint little bakery a block away from her house where they made the best donut Lily had ever tasted. It was the only donut she’d ever had. Her father would take her there every Tuesday because mommy had night shifts, or so her family thought. Between a struggling real estate agent and a supermarket cashier, there wasn’t a lot of money flowing into the Martin’s coffers and a simple donut a week was often all the father could afford when it came to eating out. Though lucky for him, Lily was too young to realise that just yet, or that the only reason that the cheap, dry confectionary bread was her comfort food

"Your professor, while a very nice man, is a sneaky son of a bitch. The reason he could never get me up here to talk about the process of writing is that I'm not sure I have much to say about it that could benefit you. I still find it all very mysterious, years after I wrote my first book. And I'm not sure what it is that compels a person to play make believe, even after they're an adult. My favorite book is a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver called What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. And in the closing lines of the title story, Carver says ' I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making. Not one of us moved. Not even when the room went dark.' And I think that that's what writing is. It's listening to that beating heart. And when we hear it, it is our job to decipher it to the best of our abilities." And there it was again, the sense that humanity is being jud