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.

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.