I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her. My whole life sort of ended when my mom died. I had to remake it again and be a new person in the world without my mom. It was a very primal rebirth, that time after my mom died.

Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.

The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.

All of us, as we mature and grow up - if we're doing life right - we evolve.

I had problems a therapist couldn't solve; grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.

The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.

There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit hole of your bitterness except your own desperate heart.