for many people, loneliness was an experience of time. 'Not knowing what to do with yourself' was the way it was usually put.

Everytime I say "sure" when I mean "no," everytime I smile brightly when I'm exploding with rage, every time I imagine my man's achievement is my own, I know the cheerleader never really died. I feel her shaking her ass inside me and I hear her breathless, girlish voice mutter "T-E-A-M, Yea, Team.

we perceive silence where, in fact, there is a muffler.

The illusion of companionship sits waiting in the television set. We keep our televisions on more than we watch them - an average of more than seven hours a day. For background. For company.

Much female conversation is, in fact, about survival - but in code.

Humor tells you where the trouble is.

In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.