Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way.

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.

It's not gender-specific, but I do think it's women who tend to start having that sort of little whispering voice of "I want more here" and "I want more for my family."

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

Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.

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!