In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.

You never know how a good quest is going to end.

Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.

If something is rubbing so hard against you, you can be sure it's working on you.

Generally speaking, that's good drama - the marriage plot or the tragedy - but the reality of women's lives is that most of us don't get what we wanted, and most of us find ways to have really interesting lives anyway.

Then my mother shocked me. She said, " All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things too." [She] showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she was happily married...) to my father. "You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I desired in life, honey. Remember- I come from a different time and place... and you have to understand how much I love your father.