What annoyed me was that I so often attempted to weasel out of things on purpose, it killed me to do it by accident. It seemed like a waste of whatever detailed lie I was going to have to come up with.

Hey there.' I cleared my throat. 'How are you?' I'm engaged!' Incidentally, this is an unacceptable answer to that question.

I called my mother immediately to inform her that she was a bad parent. "I can't believe you let us watch this. We ate dinner in front of this." "Everyone watched Twin Peaks," was her response. "So, if everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it, too?" "Don't be silly," she laughed, "of course I would, honey. There'd be no one left on the planet. It would be a very lonely place.

A human being can spend only so much time outside her comfort zone before she realizes she is still tethered to it.

In every woman's wardrobe, there are certain accessories that cannot be separated from their back stories.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

When I was nine years old, I wrote a short story called 'How to Build a Snowman,' from which no practical snowperson-crafting techniques could be gleaned. The story was an assignment for class and it featured a series of careful but meaningless instructions. Of course, the building of the snowman was a red herring.