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 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.

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

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.

Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman's life everyone else's business--you have to dig out a little place that's only yours.

Timing was everything when it came to being a woman—the moment you entered the world could seal your fate.