For many men the denial of dependency on their mother is repeated in their subsequent relationships, sometimes by an absence of any sexual interest in women, sometimes by a pattern of loving and leaving them.

Somewhere slightly before or after the close of our second decade, we reach a momentous milestone--childhood's end. We have left asafe place and can't go home again. We have moved into a world where life isn't fair, where life is rarely what it should be.

I don't intend to stop showing a little cleavage. Nor do I intend to stop flashing a little thigh.

We begin life with loss. We are cast from the womb without an apartment, a charge plate, a job or a car. We are sucking, sobbing, clinging, helpless babies.

If ambitious fantasies make people blush, and sexual fantasies make people blush and feel guilty, fantasies of violence and death may make people blush and feel guilty-and frightened too.

It is true that the present is powerfully shaped by the past. But it is also true that ... insight at any age keeps us from singing the same sad songs again.

[On writing her first poem at age eight:] An ode to my dead mother and father, who were both alive and pretty pissed off.