To me, a person's identity is composed of both an 'I' and a 'we.' The 'I' finds itself in love, work, and pleasure, but it also locates itself within some meaningful group identity - a tribe, a community, a 'we.' America is too big and bland a tribe for most of us.

I used to anticipate my childhood birthday parties as if each were an annual coronation. Like most kids, I loved sitting at the head of the table with a crown on my head.

It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody - doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.

Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let 'born again' patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.

Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.