Love is a story we tell with another person. It's cocreation through conarration. When you hit bumps in the road and challenges, you write a new chapter in your story together. Love is the constant act of revising and retelling your own story in real time. You don't do it by yourself. You do it with someone else. The only way you do that is to talk to each other and create a shared narrative.

Moses is our true founding father.

Love is a balance between independence and interdependence. In love, you want to be independent and interdependent. You want to be a little bit selfish and a little bit selfless. Love can be an antidote to loneliness, as long as there is some aloneness in it.

One of the things I've learned is to be much more open about my frailties and about our failures, because when you show your kids how you can resolve conflict in your life in real time, you're giving them confidence that when they have conflicts, they can push through them.

One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?

Here's a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive.

I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front.