A lot of women make choices based on how they saw their mother's choices working out, how they saw the choices of the women elders in their lives working out. There's some rebellion in that, but there's also some deep reflection.

Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

I've been thinking about disowning some of my genes lately. I have a few healthy, happy, long-living optimists in my family tree - most of them fans of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, a major champion of positive thinking. But I've got plenty of ancestors who played out more tortured hands.

A lot of positive psychology is stuck in being the psychology of privilege, and I reject that.

Maybe it goes without saying that if you want to become a famous writer before you’re dead, you’ll have to write something. But the folks in my classes with the biggest ideas and the best publicity shots ready to grace the back covers of their best-selling novels are also usually the ones who aren’t holding any paper.

In my experience, staying in a marriage that my ex and I both agreed had all its best moments behind it was epically depressing.