I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn - small, tasty delights - and I like to gorge on them now and then.

The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.

We're all impostors to ourselves. By that I mean that we know instinctively, intimately, the difference between whom we are inside and who we appear to be to others. Most of the time - when we aren't flat lying about something or playing a particularly stylized role in some heightened dramatic situation - this difference between the internal and the external is modest and manageable.

Reason leavened with a little wit (if possible) is the real alternative to hate speech, meaning that there's no better time for it.

What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?

I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping.

It's no accident that most self-help groups use 'anonymous' in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one.