Let me tell you something about hypochondria: It's a pernicious, undermining little demon. It won't kill you, but it will sap the color from your life so that in the loveliest moments, the moments of grace, you are hit with that whisper in your ear that takes it all away. I'm sick, I'm dying - I just don't know it yet.

I found myself doing so much public speaking, more and more and bigger and bigger.

We're all simultaneously separated and connected by our devices, staring into our little screens, and also hungry for experience and community.

It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory—childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age—are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results.

As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?