I’ve been thinking I’d like to be Daisy; I’d like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me

Like most women, I remember my first drink in tender minutiae.

I have been a ballerina, a cheerleader and a sorority girl. I was the girliest girl alive.

My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.

I think for one, we have to really accept that anger is a normal human emotion that can be a positive force for change.