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.

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and tortuous.

The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.

A writer is always working with whatever she's managed to store in the brainpan or puzzle out about the world.

My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.