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

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

Maybe someday it will seem quaint that, during a time of plague, some of the parents of the 1990s wanted to deny their children protection so that they could safeguard their own self- image. Or maybe we'll just seem like a bunch of lunatics.

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.

Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn't read, I don't know what I'd do. But as a writer, it's both a blessing and a curse. You absorb technique as you go along.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

what we call things matters. ... The words we use, and how we perceive those words, reflect how we value, or devalue, people, places, and things.