But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.

America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.

"I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies-a cypress age, a Sawtooth age-I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.