While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.

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.

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

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

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

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.

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.