You teach your 16-year-old with your heart in your mouth to be a good driver and none of that makes any difference when some drunk comes around a corner and runs a stop sign.

Decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

Wow, so much of the way I've transacted my life... so much of the results that I'm happy about are because of what Daddy did.

I'm just remembering myself at 22 or 23. I was all engine and no steering. (Laughter) I had the wheels but I had no steering. I do think it's true that when you're younger, you're more likely to listen to all the naysayers, and people are always telling you how you ought to behave and what kind of job you should get and how you should look.

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.