There is an inverse correlation between the cleanliness of a bathroom and my 3-year-old daughter's need to move her bowels.

Here are my Mommy Messages: Wear a condom and test your Molly.

I did not want to raise a genetically compromised child. I did not want my children to have to contend with the massive diversion of parental attention, and the consequences of being compelled to care for their brother after I died. I wanted a genetically perfect baby, and because that was something I could control, I chose to end his life.

I just don't have a lick of optimism left in me.

I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that.

I really think we were charting a course to having a more sane response to mass incarceration, to drug use, and to understanding that the war on drugs has resulted only in the empowerment of vast criminal enterprises and the destruction of democracies around the world. And all that is coming to a miserable, horrific halt.

I was a federal public defender during the most important years of the drug war. I saw people go to jail for nothing, and go to jail for a long time.