For me, the historical and genealogical library is the one I use. I'm working on, I'll say, it's a time travel novel. I haven't written very much of it. That's the dirty secret of the Cullman center: The writers don't write their fiction there, they just do their research.

Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.

The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.

When you were a little girl, Madam.....was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?