Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.

Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.

A baby's mother also needs a mother.

Is perception equivalent to existence?

I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.

This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away.