I've always felt that one of the mistakes people make is that they try to do something that is just slightly beyond their skill set, and then feel they've failed.

In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

You're born, you die. Everything in between is subject to interpretation.

Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them.

Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won't have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don't mean to be too literal about this.

Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

We have a game we play when we’re waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was [in my twenties], I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy.