You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.

The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.

People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.

Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.

My parents deeply and truly loved each other, and if my mother hadn't died they would have been together forever. They were together for as much of forever as was given to them. They really loved my brother and me and were very good to us. It gave the model of how to have a happy marriage and family, but it also set the bar very high.

The most important thing to remember about depression is this: you do not get the time back. It is not tacked on at the end of your life to make up for the disaster years. Whatever time is eaten by a depression is gone forever. The minutes that are ticking by as you experience the illness are minutes you will not know again.

If the Mormon Church still supported polygamy, and if it appeared to be a system that was not exploitative of women, I wouldn't feel that it's my place to forbid it.