But when you envision the perfect flowers and the perfect food and the perfect outdoor space and the perfect weather, you forget that you can't rent the perfect family to go along with it. You're stuc...
How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?
Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.
The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter’s food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere y...
She and Gerald rarely argued, and when they did, she quickly nipped it in the bud, silently reciting an Ogden Nash poem entitled A Word to Husbands, though she thought it applied to just as well to wi...
It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.
But then you were alone, your body trying to heal itself while your mind went numb. There was a mix of joy and the purest love, couples with real boredom and occasional rage. It got easier as the kids...
He also believed that loyalty was earned - sharing a bloodline didn't mean you had to be close.
Beyond those was a stretch of sand and miles of dark blue sea. You couldn't make out a thing on the other side. As a little girl, Maggie believed that the world dropped off out there, that if you swam...
Well, Chrissy, I'm afraid your grandmother's Irish Alzheimer's has gotten quite advanced - she's forgotten everything but her grudges.
She didn't have a single friend on earth to see her off. She had outlived them all.
Motherhood was a physical act as much as an emotional one. It took every part of you.
Men made mistakes and when they asked forgiveness, women forgave. It happened every day.
April's just a Dixie cup of crazy. Lydia's more like a twenty-gallon tank
It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it.
All over the planet women were being tormented, yet if you took sexism seriously, you were a bore, an idiot, or a pain in the ass.
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.
This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn’t hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, de...
This was a bargain she struck, a ritual to guarantee safety. Nothing truly bad could happen if she was expecting it.
Kate was often preoccupied with how to do good in a corrupt world, where just by eating dinner or turning on a laptop each of us was complicit in someone else's suffering. She struggled with how to sp...