You know how some people, when they're together, they somehow make you feel more hopeful? Make you feel like the world is not the insane place it really is?

Don't ever admit you know a thing about cooking or it'll be used against you.

I come to writing from hearing great stories as a child in Louisiana, where the mark of a person was his or her ability to be a raconteur. I also come to writing as a professional actress whose body has been trained to listen and smell and inhabit characters without judgment.

Good enough is good enough. Perfect will make you a big fat mess every time.

I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

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

I think of myself as Rebecca Wells from Lodi Plantation, in Central Louisiana, a girl who was lucky enough to be born into a family that encouraged creativity and didn't call me lazy or nuts when I dressed up in my mother's peignoirs and played the piano, having painted a small sign decorated in glitter that read 'The Piano Fairy Girl.