Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

I have a very dark sense of humor. I swear. I have a very playful relationship with Jesus.

The women's movement burst forth when I was fifteen. That was when I began to believe that life might semi-work out after all. The cavalry had arrived. Women were starting to say that you got to tell the truth now, that you had to tell the truth if you were going to heal and have an authentic life.

Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

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.