Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.

I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy--getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff--get undercut by having to play football.

The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.