When you love someone more than he loves you, you'll do anything to switch the scales. You dress the way you think he'd like you to dress. You pick up his favorite figures of expression. You tell yourself that if you re-create yourself in his image, then he'll crave you in the same way you crave him.

When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep her close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: Until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.

If you loved someone, really loved them, would you let them go?

Relationships always sounded so physically painful: you fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars?

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.

She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.

If you were drifting with a thousand other people, could you really still say you were lost?