I never claimed to be a low-maintenance gal, but when I'm writing, it's particularly challenging. I lose things constantly: my watch, my glasses, my papers, my mind.

The love we most cherish will, of necessity, bring us pain. Because that love is like the setting of a body with broken bones. But I want to stage the setting. I want to direct all scenes.

we have to suffer mosquitoes the size of blackbirds.

As a writer, I am not goddess of the universes I create. I am at most a stage manager of the plentiful gifts which tumble out of the horn of plenty, which is to say there is a source so sweet and forgiving and generous that I pray every day to let that source be my guide.

What they don't know is that I went over the edge years ago, and lived to tell the tale.

How wide and sweet and wild motherhood and sisterhood can be.

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.