Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.

Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.

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.

My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.

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

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.