If your love didn't always contain the possibility of loss, it would be very different from human love as we know it.

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.

Being in a marriage and having children is the greatest pleasure, but it is certainly not the easiest pleasure. It is not like eating ice cream.

I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.

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.

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.

I spent years thinking I had to make a choice between being true to myself and being with a man and not having a family, and trying to live something of a lie and being with a woman and having children.