Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

My mother was a single parent, a speech therapist who worked for a company that kept a substantial percentage of the income they billed for her to teach stroke victims in convalescent hospitals to talk again.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.

In every person's face, there is one place that seems to express them most accurately. With my grandmother, you always looked at her mouth.