Badass is a juvenile aspiration.

You are always going to face forces that can bring you to your knees.

My father has said a hundred times, and I have paid attention, that it's stupid to let money be the reason you don't do something.

I was purely content to sit in the car and wander around my own mind. Watching the world itself, the people in it, and my whole internal life was more than enough to keep me entertained.

It's promising and seductive, that huge Italian family, sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by olive trees. But it's not my family and I am not their family, and no amount of birthing sons, and cooking dinner and raking leaves or planting the gardens or paying for the plane tickets is going to change that. If I don't come back in eleven months, I will not be missed, and no one will write me or call me to acknowledge my absence. Which is not an accusation, just a small truth about clan and bloodline.

How can it be, after all this concentrated effort and separation, how can it be that I still resemble, so very closely, my own detestable mother?

I’m not afraid of the real truth. There is nothing you can tell me about yourself that is going to make me clutch my pearls.