Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us.

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.

I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.

If you are hoping to find your self-worth and fulfillment in other peoples' opinion of your writing, you will never find it.

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do?

I do for myself exactly what I would do for you - make a lovely cup of tea, or a hot bath, or go buy myself a fabulous pair of socks. I believe that you take the action, and THEN the insight follows - I do loving things for me, stroke my own shoulder, put myself down for a short nap, and the insight follows: that I am a wild precious woman, a human merely being, as e e cummings put it, deserving of respect, tenderness, protection, delight, and solidarity. And that is what Home looks like for me now.

I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something -- that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook.