Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.

Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.

I'm writing this memoir from the perspective of somebody who's prosperous and has means. Having said that, one of the things that I think I discovered about those additional years is that I don't think they really are added to the end of life.

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

Speech is the voice of the heart.

There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.

For most of my life the only ceremonies I've been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.