At one point, she'd wanted to hurl the whole breakfast at the wall. And then she'd remember why it was that men had temper tantrums and women didn't: cleanup.

Memories are who we are. In the end, that's all the luggage you take with you. Love and Memories are what last.

Thoughts - even fears - were airy things, formless until you made them solid with your voice and once given that weight, they could crush you.

Nina knew the power of black and white images. Sometimes a thing was its truest self when the colors were stripped away.

Honestly, I believe that the mother-daughter relationship is magical, complex, potentially dangerous, profoundly powerful, and deeply transformative. To put it simply, all of us have this relationship, and in a very real way, "none of us comes out alive." We are all formed first as daughters and then tested as mothers. There's nothing like motherhood to make us reassess how we were as daughters.

Whenever I write about motherhood - and I write about it a lot - I am drawing on my experiences as a mother and also my experiences as a daughter.

It's not intentions that matter. It's actions. We are what we do and say, not what we intend to.