I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.

You look invincible,' my mother said one night. I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said: I am.

In my 20s, I railed against anything 'spiritual', I thought it was all crap.

Tess was my first experience of a woman who had inhabited her weirdness, moved into the areas of herself that made her distinct from those around her, and learned how to display them proudly.

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.

If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.

Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?