"Criticism is the hardest to take when you know there’s truth to it.  Which is maybe why I cringe a little each time I hear that my work is bleak or depressing.  When I was writing THE GOD OF ANIMALS, my life was not exactly the stuff of fairy tales.  I was poor and lonely and living in a crappy apartment over a meth lab.  My love life was a Chernobyl-sized disaster, and I didn’t understand why life was so hard, so raw, so unfair.  I took my fears and questions and worries to the same place I always take them—the page.  I let my characters ask the questions I couldn’t give myself permission to ask, allowed them to explore the desires I was ashamed to admit I had, gave them the space to make the mistakes I was terrified of making myself.  Night after night, I took my heartache to that ranch, and night by night, it saved me." -- Aryn Kyle in her mostly funny essay, "'This Book Made Me Want to Die,' and Other Thoughts from Readers"