Someone needs to give the Pope thirteen babies. Just for a week or so. See how he likes no birth control then.

I learned a lot of details about 1920s clothes, cars, kitchen appliances, and food. I had a character eating peanut butter in one scene until I learned that peanut butter wasn't commercially packaged and sold until 1924.

The young can exasperate, of course, and frighten, and condescend, and insult, and cut you with their still unrounded edges. But they can also drag you, as you protest and scold and try to pull away, right up to the window of the future, and even push you through.

Someone needs to give the Pope thirteen babies. Just for a week or so. See how he likes no birth control then.

Worrying was painful .... but compared to the alternative, a privilege

It's like swimming, underwater, this whole year. I just close my eyes. hold my breath, and keep kicking.

I always found Louise Brooks interesting. She was an icon of the silent - film era, and I knew she'd grown up in Kansas, and that she was smart and rebellious and sharp - tongued.