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.

I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under.

I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.

When we agree to being part of something bigger than our own wired, fixated minds, we are saved.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again... or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.