To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.

In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist.

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.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

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.