I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose.

Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.

One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn’t help it and didn’t know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife.