When you get everything you wanted, I think maybe you do have to be a little grateful for the people who got you there... whether or not they thought they were doing you any favors at the time.

I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish.

...thinking that the world was like an orange, that I could split it open with my thumbnail and find a whole different world, the grown-up world, the secrets beneath the skin.

I like blogs. they're good times.

I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

They wouldn’t have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you’re on a battleground, you don’t have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing’s broken, nothing’s wrong.