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.

Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.

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 am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

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

A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.