A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.

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

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

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

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.

One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.

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