What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world off-kilter? It’s like leaving the train at the wrong stop: You are still you, but in a new place, there by accident or grace, and you will need your wits about you to proceed.

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.

If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.

My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window.

memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain.

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.