Latchkey, you're killing me! I'm going to dive into the the most heartbreaking part. Q:“How can you trust anyone? ” A: You can't. Q. “Is it reasonable for me to believe in lasting love from this point forward?” A. No. Q.“Can this happen to anyone?” A: Yes. Q: “Is this sort of condition preventable?” No! No! Latchkey! Your parents skipped an important parenting step, the part where they systematically disappoint and disillusion you for years with escalating intensity, in order to indoctrinate you into the existential truth of the human condition. This usually starts with things like giving you cake when you wanted ice cream and outing Santa Claus, moving on to fighting behind closed doors while you beg for them to stop, criticizing each other at the dinner table and calling you a stupid idiot when you try to do math, culminating in social anxiety by proxy in high school, when they should have been dishing out hurtful comments about your physical appearance and sexual orientation, and, if everything was on schedule, begun making inappropriate revelations about their personal lives.

I'm sorry that they failed you in this way! Though I guess it was sweet of them to want to protect you from all the bad stuff. They tried really hard too, since you've been able to see them in a warm light for thirty years, and that makes me think they must love you very much. But now you're thirty, the planet's dying, so let's unscrew those warm incandescent bulbs and look at this under the glare of compact fluorescence. Relationships involve fighting. It's extremely difficult to get along with another person for years—fully, in an alive way—without disagreements. You were missing something, and your parents probably helped you miss it. But it was there. If you're truly convinced there was no fighting, I'd guess that one of two things was going on: 1) your parents, out of love for you, managed to shield you from their fights, or 2) one of your parents accommodated the other so skillfully that most fighting was avoided.

It's usually the woman who does the accommodating. This involves a certain amount of self-effacement, which almost causes resentment. Which leads me to your next question: "What was she thinking?" A: It's three things, probably a little of each: resentment, sexuality, mortality.

Resentment: your mom gave too much and got sick of it. Women tend to hold families together emotionally, even when the dads are great guys (and great dads aren't the same as great husbands). Sometimes the kids don't see it, and you've had the incandescent lights on, softly dimmed, for a while. But sometimes women sacrifice parts of themselves until they just can't do it anymore. They just can't. They feel emptied out.

Sexuality: I'm sure you don't want the details, so I'll spare you speculations. But it's entirely possible that your parents have a bad sex life. I know it probably doesn't seem like it, but old people are just like young ones, full of roiling emotions and longings. These may not be quite as urgent as they once were, but they're still a major engine driving human history, even the history of sixty year-old moms.

Mortality: Your mother turned sixty and realized that she's going to die, die, really die—full of resentment, with a shitty sex life, giving up parts of herself to her family—and she didn't want to go on living that way until she just died.

She wants a second life. That's the clearest answer of all—the one you gave yourself. But really, of course, I don't know what she's thinking. Why don't you ask her?

As for what you should do to help them, the best thing you can do is to try to stay on good terms with both of them, without taking sides. It's impossible to know what really goes on in another couple's relationship. I know you feel angry and betrayed, and I don't blame you, but I'm sure your mother had a good reason for leaving your dad. She's been so nice for so long—how could it not be a good reason? It just might be a grown-up human reason, a soul-based reason, a sexual reason—and it's going to be hard for you to see this in her, given that they've kept this side of themselves away from you for so long. But if you really want to see, you can see. You can brighten the lights and look.

Hi Liam. Thanks for reading my film reviews! You're nice, especially since I had to write some of them so quickly that I was pulling a lot of crap out of, I don't know, my ass? I have mixed feelings about literary theory in general. At its best, it's smart and fun. I like ideas, and I like ideas about ideas. I like thought, and I like thoughts about thought. But I don't think it has much to do with literature. Rather, it is its own thing, with its own system of thought, and while it has plenty of merits, I'm not sure it needs literature to exist. Which is fine, I guess, but I don't know why literary theory needs English departments.

But I also kind of hate literary theory because most of it is written in a style that's absolutely impossible to read. I know that complicated thoughts can be expressed clearly and without jargon, without nouns turned into verbs and "to be sure's" and paragraphs that have their point buried in a subordinate clause. That smart people have collectively abandoned clarity enrages me. That this kind of writing has become customary in academic circles enrages me. What kind of person writes, say Marxist criticism that condemns elitism, in an elite dialect that can only be understood by other academics? It's retarded. Plus no one else has access to their ideas, unless they wish to be tortured by language. They're like priests saying the mass in Latin. It has a kind of aura. But only other priests can really get it.

Hi Maddy, I haven't forgotten you...I just want to do a little research to give you a better list. I'm not the greatest person to ask about literary magazines because I don't teach, and therefore I'm not as dialed in to all the great new stuff. I like Willow Springs, Fairy Tale Review, The Mississippi Review, Tin House, Zoetrope, and The Sonora Review, but I'll bet there are other great journals I don't know about. I'm going to ask a friend who's up on it and try to e x p a n d.

Thanks, Miranda. I'm writing a novel now but it probably won't be out for a while.

As for my style of writing, it's sort of weird how I don't even know exactly what it is--I think it's like having an accent, it's hard to recognize your own. But off the top of my head, some great writers who write funny-strange short stories are Kelly Link, Amy Bender, George Saunders, and Karen Russell. But there are so many more!

Cool! I love robots on fire. Did you make that great film?

I sincerely hope you're planning to have a bowl of drugs by the entrance door.

Yes, I got a letter from my agent, so she basically found me. It was weirdly easy. Honestly Incog, I have no idea how to go about finding an agent. But since I have male answer syndrome, I'll throw out some suggestions. You could ask someone who teaches in an MFA program--they probably know what some of their students did. You could ask our oracle, Google. You could call an agent's office, be nice to their assistant, and ask how a person goes about finding an agent. You could go to the library and see what kind of info you find there.

Okay. Boys: Tom Hardy, because he's got all that sexy charisma. Clive Owen, because he loves me, I'm pretty sure. Sacha Baron Cohen, because I'm just so right for him. Tiger Woods, because he sounds like fun and I want to have Ambien sex.

Girls: Britney Spears, because it's fun to have sex with crazy people and I love her weird wide-eyed face. And Megan Fox: no explanation required.

Hi Littleshirly, Yes, just send them to Stacey@staceyrichter.com. I'm excited! If I don't get them I'll post further instructions here. I love Malice in Derbyland--you gals sounds scary and cute.

Try not to be too disoriented when violence pops up in your writing. Go with it if you can. Violence is a form of conflict and conflict is what makes fiction chug forward. Though it may make you feel like a freak, remember that everyone has violent thoughts and fantasies. Nuns, ballerinas, woodworkers, veterinarians--they all carry around images of stabbing their mothers and strangling the UPS man and removing other people's heads. But sometimes these thoughts are beneath the surface, since civilization requires a certain amount of repression so we can function as social creatures. Women, especially, are taught to do some nice repression in this area, which is why we're disturbed when the violence shoots to the surface like a balloon we were holding underwater and forgot about. Oh no, what's that? It's violence! What does it mean? It means you're a normal person! It doesn't mean you're depraved or unnice or a budding sociopath. But it might mean you're angry. That can be scary, yes. Things that inspire anger are usually things that hurt you, with anger forming a scab around the wound that starts to bleed if you pick at it. No one likes doing this. But the weird thing is that no one likes not doing it either. Sometimes you have to pick at the violent-angry-pain scab. It’s part of making art. Which is another reason why making art is not exactly pleasant.

Yes, but I don't do it that often. I usually do it when I have something on my mind or feel forlorn that no one's asked me a question for a while. The first-ever two questions were my own because there was no one else around and I wanted to set the tone--one is about writing, one is about boys.

Not that you asked, but if you want to look them up, here's a list of all the pseudonyms I've used for self-posts, going backward in time: One Who Wonders, The Wonderer, Philibert, grape popsicle, Beehive Hairdo, Papusa of the Night, Official A, Chrysalis, Leela Johnson, INVADED, Bunny Hat, and Cree-8-ive.

It sounds like a lot but it's not that many. It includes all the questions with pictures in the answers (these are mostly pictures of insects, but there's also a REAL NOTE from my mother), a plea to young writers not to move heavy objects (since my back became so fucked from moving heavy objects), a plea to post reviews of Twin Study on Amazon (completely ignored), and some thoughts on writing sex scenes. So most of the question are real. The fakes often have a public-service slant. Do I feel guilty? Yes, I feel guilty. From now on, I'll make all the fake ones come from Cree-8-ive. She has questions. Lately she has questions about grammar and usage, but she's been holding back.