It's a blessing not to be alone in your grief but it's also painful to see your parents and siblings in pain.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

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.

There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.

What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.

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.

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