In my life as a wife and mother, I'm always conscious of my desire to be present.

We don't choose what's going to wake us up.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

I'm very disciplined, but the one thing that I have addictive behavior about is the Internet.

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?

In every generation there is a vault-keeper, one who guards the links fiercely and knows they are more precious than rubies.

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself.