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

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.

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.

She thought about him all the time - not so much about Doug the individual, but rather about the nature of love, and the shock of learning how quickly it could disappear.

I admire the linear and decisive way a certain kind of man thinks, to my curlicue boundless overthinking.

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.

She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.