Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength.

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.

To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

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