When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she’d give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species.

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

For whatever reason, various outlets and individuals are committed to making the world think that young girls don't talk or care about feminism anymore, that it's totally over. But it's not.

I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One.

A kid thinks her mother is just that -- hers. A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women's private lives a public affair to people who knew them and even people who didn't.

There were so many ways to be twenty-six years old.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.