We dated in our early 20s, when we were working at the same newspaper. We broke up, got back together and broke up again. I wanted to get married and have kids, but he wasn't ready. So I married someone else, had my daughters and the marriage ended ... and there was Bill. He'd never gotten married and was finally, finally ready. We discovered that we were still each other's favorite people to talk to.

Baby," groaned the guy-Ted? Tad?-something like that-and crushed his lips against the side of her neck, shoving her face against the wall of the toilet stall.

People are always coming up to me with my books and saying, 'You write these things I think but I could never say,'

I struggle with the fact that men's popular fiction is talked about differently. Books like mine don't get as many reviews and probably won't win any prizes, but they entertain the pants off of hundreds of thousands of women.

Addie, please." More tears dripped down her cheeks. "Don't be so hard." "Oh, please," I muttered...and that was as far as I got. 'You broke my heart' were the words that had risen to my mouth, but I couldn't say them. That was what you said to a boyfriend, a lover, not your best friend. She'd laugh. And I'd had enough of being laughed at. I'd worked hard to get to a place where it didn't happen anymore, where I didn't move through life like a walking target, where it was just me and my paints and brushes and my big empty bed every night. "You weren't a good friend," I said instead.

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

I've learned that some broken things stay broken, and I've learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you.