The problem was, he’d never told me what he wanted, which meant I never got to think about whether it was what I wanted, too.
Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.
Inadequacy and impostor syndrome are painful. They’re also great motivators.
Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you...
The difference between people who believe they have books inside of them and those who actually write books is sheer cussed persistence - the ability to make yourself work at your craft, every day - t...
Dubious,
They say - they being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld - that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can't just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock i...
The way I see it, she began, your mother’s devoted her whole life to you kids. She said you kids in precisely the same tone I would have used for you infestation of cockroaches
The measure of a man is, does he know how to love.
So I could write a story about a girl who was a lot like me, her ex-boyfriend, who was a lot like Satan, witha twitchy eyelid and a penis the size of a worn-down nub of an eraser.
People don’t like to see things that aren’t perfect. It reminds them of what could go wrong in their own lives, I guess.
Love, I said, is the rug they pull out from under you. Love is Lucy always lifting the football at the last second so that Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Love is something that every time you believe...
Jo thought sometimes that Bethie liked to play at being a rebel, when the truth was that her sister had a genius for conformity, for making herself the best, most stylish example of whatever version o...
I’d lost . . . ten pounds? Twelve? Enough to make me believe that if I just kept at it I could lose the weight, the percentage of myself, that would finally make my body acceptable. Enough to make me...
I wanted love, the big love, the kind people wrote songs and made movies about. I wanted to be the center of some guy’s universe, the only thing he could think about. I wanted to matter that way.
I remember McPhee's notes, penciled in the margins: If humor is tragedy plus time, this needs more time. It wasn't the first occasion I was forced to think about the line between funny and mean, betwe...
I believed in newspapers’ mission, the importance of their role as a watchdog, holding the powerful accountable, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
Had become an EST instructor, which made both of them laugh.
You're allowed to want to use your education. You're allowed to want to be more than a mother.