I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place.

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.

You can either practice being right or practice being kind.

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.

If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

The problem with God - or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God - is that he or she rarely answers right away.

These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.