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.

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.

In high school, during marathon phone conversations, cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides, I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were, or at least who I thought they might become.

She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet much, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.

You all seem to think that you should marry someone when you feel this intense emotion, which you call love. And then you expect that the love will fade over time, as life gets harder. When what you should do is find yourself a nice enough fellow and let real love develop over years and births and deaths and so on.

The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.