Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.

I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.

I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up time step with shuffle.

This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.