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

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.

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.

Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while Im walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.

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.

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

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