One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

I was not raised with religion, and I had no faith before my mother died. On the other hand, when she died, I did not immediately feel she was "gone." I don't believe she is in something like heaven, but I also feel that we don't understand much about the nature of the universe. So I hold on to that uncertainty, at times.

What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.