Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.

Delia picked at the raw sores of her conscience...Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.

For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.