I started keeping a diary in third grade and, in solidarity with Anne Frank, gave it a name and made it my confidante. To this day, I feel comforted and relieved of loneliness, no matter how foreign my surroundings, if I have a pad and a pen with which to record my experiences.
I'm a writer, not an activist. My job is to analyse things, to think them through and examine them.
Everyone's marriage is different. But everyone's marriage is a compromise.
There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda, but it doesn't work that way.
Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled.
I don't hear women who are less privileged thinking they're entitled to everything, whenever they want it. That's a privilege phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon.
I was not big on playing house. I preferred make-believe that revolved around adventure, featuring pirates and knights. I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids.
The 10 or 20 minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic; there is no adventure I would have traded them for.
I think what's dangerous about marriage is the way it can make you feel like you've got it all wrapped up. Like you're done: you've found your spouse, you've married him or her, and you don't need to think too much more about it.
I decided early that I would be a writer when I grew up. That, I thought, was the profession that went with the kind of woman I wanted to become: one who is free to do whatever she chooses.
I never understood what the big deal is about privacy.
I haven't really rebelled. I just think my parents were right. I never disagreed with anything that I was brought up with, in terms of their values or politics.
A wedding, a great wedding, is just a blast. A celebration of romance and community and love... What is unfun about that? Nothing.
It's a profound thing to watch another human being come out of your body.
For 10 minutes, I was somebody's mother, and that was both the most traumatic and also the most transcendent experience of my life.
No one could save me from the grief of losing my child or losing my first marriage. I had to do that on my own.
I think all the time about the ways in which I'm the beneficiary of the women's movement's success.
I was not a popular little girl. I played Robinson Crusoe in a small wooden fort that my parents built for me in the back yard. In the fort, I was neither ostracized nor ill at ease - I was self-reliant, brave, ingeniously surviving, if lost.
This thinking that you can have every single thing you want in life is not the thinking of a feminist. It's the thinking of a toddler.
People didn't like me; I was loud and aggressive. People can take it from a 42-year-old, but when you're a little kid, and people are like, 'You're loud and awful,' you think, 'I guess I am awful,' so writing and figuring out how to put things into words was the way I felt better.
