What the altar-bound of today end up buying from their numberless vendors is a dog's breakfast of bridal excess - part society wedding of the twenties, part Long Island Italian wedding of the fifties. It's The Philadelphia Story and The Wedding Singer served up together in one curious and costly buffet.

Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.

Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.

Mothers ... would do anything to steer their daughter the right way. It is frustrating beyond measure for them when a daughter screams, 'You don't understand, and you'll never understand!' The mother stamps her foot in aggravation, but in this case the daughter is right: the mother doesn't understand. She merely remembers, and memory is separate from experience.