Your body is just a vessel for who you are as a person. And until you work on what you give back to the world, it doesn't matter what you look like on the outside.

When you finally accept that you're a complete dork, your life gets easier. No sense in trying to be cool.

I don't think these women are stupid. I think they're selling a personality that's very marketable: Wouldn't it be fun if we were all gorgeous and didn't have a care? But creating a cultural icon out of someone who goes, I'm stupid, isn't it cute? makes me want to throw daggers at them! I want to say to them, My grandma did not fight for what she fought for, and my mother did not fight for what she fought for, so you can start telling women it's fun to be stupid. Saying that to young women, little girls, my daughter? It's not OK.

I mean, really: He called me 33 percent lesbian, which was a gross underestimation of my lesbian-ness.

The more respect I had for myself, and the more I took care of myself, the more I understood what I needed out of a partner.

I grew up in Tennessee. We didn't know what Louis Vuitton was. I had to order all my prom outfits out of catalogs.

I was all of these women. I've been a young mom; I've been a divorcée; I've been a single mom. I've been the working mom versus the nonworking mom.