Toad by Katherine Dunn

"Dunn occasionally crossed out her own rather lovely and lucid writing, such as the paragraph that begins, “But I love myself now better than anyone else ever could.” It seemed to me quite important to preserve this passage, lest readers confuse Sally’s frequent, and difficult to stomach, self-disparagement as the primary impetus for the experiment of her own self-exile. On the contrary, Sally’s great accomplishment is having carved, with great effort, a life of her own imagining—a feat every woman on earth would tell you requires a sharp sense of self-preservation and no small amount of self-love. So, the passage stays, and I believe it underscores and clarifies Sally’s powerful, and deeply personal, grounding philosophy." - Huffman