Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

I'll tell you the truth - I went to a women's college, Barnard, the most selective college for women in America today. If there's one thing I came out of Barnard with, because it was a women's college and a great institution of higher education, it was fearlessness.

I think anyone who comes upon a Nautilus machine suddenly will agree with me that its prototype was clearly invented at some time in history when torture was considered a reasonable alternative to diplomacy.

People ask me all the time if I'm from a family of writers. The literal short answer is no, but my father and his brothers and sisters and his mother are all people who would sit around with a Tom Collins and tell stories that seemed to get better and better each time they told them.

I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.

I once wanted to be a personage. Now I am comfortable being a person.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.