I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like to be raised by someone who had loathed herself, her husband, even her own name.

We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.

... one of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people. [p. 65]

Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God's advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.

...since you can't heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, I needed to consult somebody else's sick mind.

We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.