But what if your obsession has nothing to do with drugs or thrills or money? What if what you want most in the world is to recapture the way life was a week, a month, a year ago-and you are willing to do whatever it takes?

I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don't understand how I'm going to get from here to there.

I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.

let me tell you what happens when you cook down the syrup of loss over the open fire of sorrow: it solidfies into something wlaw. not grief, like you'd expect, or even regret. no, it gets thick as paste, black as ash; yet it isn't until you dip a finger in and feel that sharp taste dissolving on your tounge that you realize this is angel in its purest form, unrefined; a substance to be weighed and measyred and spread.