I really think the human experience is very similar for everyone; we're all doing slightly different versions of the same thing.
You find out what you are made of when you have a broken heart. If it happens early and often, all the better.
No one is all good or all bad, and there's many different ways to go about your life.
Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series is a national treasure, beloved by generations. But what I love most is the peek it provides into the planting, harvesting, hunting, and preparing of the foods that America's settler families ate in the late 1800s.
Skeptical of strangers, lobstermen are keepers of secrets, working in the howling wind and hot sun, the icy snows, and bewildering fog. When I was growing up, the lore was that they had the right to shoot anyone who messed with their traps.
Life is funny, at the same time being totally harsh.
When you work alone at home, time can become shapeless. There are no eleven o'clock meetings or afternoon coffee breaks. The light outside may clue me in to what part of the day it is, but if all is going well, the hours bleed together.
I love memoirs and biographies, learning about other people's lives. Two of the ones that I loved so much were actually edited by the same person who edited my book, too. I loved 'Angela's Ashes.' I loved 'Glass Castle' so much.
There has never been a shrimp that I've eaten that I haven't been like, 'I am so lucky that I get to eat this.' I would eat a shrimp enchilada, shrimp burrito, shrimp cocktail, fried shrimp, shrimp po boy, shrimp gumbo.
When I was growing up, my mother worked, and in the evenings, the whole family would sit around the dinner table and recount the day.
When you have a traumatic event in your life, you change. You're not the same person you were, and you have to discover who you've become.
Reading cookbooks will help with just about anything in your life, including heartbreak.
Sprinkling drops of lavender and clary-sage oil into a bath is a totally simple yet complex pleasure.
I had been living in Ohio in my own house with my own life when my marriage abruptly came to an end. I had nowhere to go with my two sons, very little money, and not much to do in Ohio except be someone's ex-wife. My parents instantly and very generously invited my family to move back home to New York, where I could begin again.
Accounts of eating Christmas sweet potatoes baked in ashes and jackrabbit stewed with white flour dumplings are testaments to pioneer resilience and pleasure - and they help inspire my own best scratch cooking.
When your heart is broken, you feel like no freaking book in the world could help you because a book is not the person who you love, who doesn't love you. However, books help, if only because they serve as something you can hold in your hand and throw across the room in agony.
If you are heartbroken and can't face the world, you need something with a fantastic plot. You won't be able to read anything boring because your attention span when you are heartbroken decreases by three-quarters.
Anita Shreve is an author I adore. I rip through her meaty books and get off on the robust romance immensely - especially if I am feeling less than robust in my real life.
When I think of the moment I knew that my marriage to Josiah would end, there were a few moments before I really, really knew. I probably knew, when I saw my ex-husband and his now wife - then colleague - having tea together in his office, that something was amiss.
I love teenagers. I loved being a teenager.
