It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it’s this way for everyone.

During chemo, you're more tired than you've ever been. It's like a cloud passing over the sun, and suddenly you're out. But you also find that you're stronger than you've ever been. You're clear. Your mortality is at optimal distance, not up so close that it obscures everything else, but close enough to give you depth perception. Previously, it has taken you weeks, months, or years to discover the meaning of an experience. Now it's instantaneous.

I feel in some ways I've had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.

He said, "People wait their whole lives for the kind of happiness we have.

He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women. I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. More proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone.

Finally, I asked how you got a boy to like you back. She said, 'Just be yourself,' as though I had any idea who that might be.

I tried to avoid Mimi. Her presence seemed to call forth every rejection I'd ever experienced-the teachers who'd looked at me as though I held no promise, the boys who didn't like me back. Around her, I became fourteen again.