I have the best divorce of anyone I've heard of.

You should be concerned about the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account.

So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

I went to Princeton, I minored in women's studies.

I was 45 when I wrote most of this book [Hungry Heart ], at what felt like a halfway point in my life, and I thought, If I can't be honest now, when will it happen? It was so hard to step away from the [protection of] fiction, but I'm ready to talk start telling their truth.

If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?