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.'

The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.

Frankly, I'm mainly telling the story to myself. Thinking about audience is too daunting, and worst case, invites you to homogenize, to soften the hard edges of things.

We don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.

Down time is where we become ourselves... a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

I was very driven, very focused, very ambitious. I mean, when I look back on myself in my 20s, part of me just cringes.

If I had to guess what the new Etch-A-Sketch picture is going to be like, it's going to be considerably less to the right. Romney has backed himself into a couple of corners that I don't think will serve him well in the general election, the main one being very harsh stands on immigration, which I think are not only short-sighted but to my mind immoral.