I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]

We don't ruminate during a fight. Maybe in a bath, or driving a car, or as we take a walk. But not right smack in the middle of a dramatic moment.

There's nothing confessional about crafting and shaping a story out of a lived life. In fact, it's quite the opposite - the writer has to be able to transcend the life, to see it as if standing outside of it, in order to be able to make something of it. There's something enormously satisfying and gratifying about crafting something, taking all that chaos and giving it shape.

I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It's physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank.

Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same.

Strange - I'm not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don't stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!

Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.