Pregnancy—we were taught, if we were privileged—was something awful that went with sex, just as AIDS and genital warts went with sex, unless you used condoms (and even then, be really careful). It was...
It's just a place, not another state of being.
We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers, we want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, cosiness and thrills, but we can't have it all.
I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and auto...
And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.
The whole point is that everybody gets to marry the person they love.
Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive.
We were taking on the care of, together. They slept in the bed with us and followed us around from room to room, except sometimes when we crossed paths with them and they looked at us as if they were...
We decided to get another cat—no, two! A pair of tiny, spotted sisters from an animal shelter on Long Island. We brought them home in a cardboard box punched with holes that they poked their noses thr...
There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows.
Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God.
We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept 'sexy'.
Has my watch stopped? she wrote. No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don’t look at them. Think of something else—anything else; think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in...
Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.
Behind the bar, tall females in white feathered tops danced on poles, their faces set in masks of lascivious contempt. Keith Blanchard, then Maxim’s editor-in-chief, told me, It’s a sexy night!To me,...
We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising.
We shared an explosive enthusiasm that we blasted out of our bodies with alcohol.
There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment.
It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man.
I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, Everybody doesn’t get everything. It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essent...