an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.

There is no neutrality. There is only greater or lesser awareness of one's bias.

One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.

Men seem more bound to the wheel of success than women do. That women are trained to get satisfaction from affiliation rather thanachievement has tended to keep them from great achievement. But it has also freed them from unreasonable expectations about the satisfactions that professional achievement brings.

When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,"Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?" If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does?

biographies are a little like marriages: You only have room in your life for one or two.

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.