The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year’s Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that...

I mark my years or parenting by the people who stepped in and forced me to abandon my inclination to meddle, micromanage, and coddle, beginning with my children’s father, who sat me down and told...

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous.

Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the dozens of things...

The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered...

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don’t discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it’s stupid. Banning books shows you don’t trust your kids to think and you don’t trust yourself to be able...

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother… Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

It is so easty to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes…It is so easy to exist instead of live.

The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you’d never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages...

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

The curse of having young people about the house was that they were always so redolent of possibility.

Being a reporter is as much a diagnosis as a job description

I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they’re not too terrible–well, even perhaps the truly terrible ones–and will reread something...

H.L. Mencken once said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. As she looked down at her dead child, Mary Beth realized that the unbearable sense of...

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn’t have invented The New York Review of Books.

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason...

I had that feeling you have when you’re watching a sad movie, sobbing at the heartbreak you are feeling at the same time that you know the heartbreak isn’t exactly real, that it will be...

All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the...

there is still a kind of unique loneliness to child rearing for women. We so often do it in isolation. Add to the fact that in our competitive, perfectionist culture, in which the price woman...

If I get the forty additional years statisticians say are likely coming to me, I could fit in at least one, maybe two new lifetimes. Sad that only one of those lifetimes can include being...

The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured...

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed...

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man...

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That’s how life is most of the time,...

Sometimes I live so much in my mind that I forget what is right before my eyes.

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

A loose end – that’s what we woman call it, when we are overwhelmed by the care of small children, the weight of small tasks, a life in which we fall into bed at the...

If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They’re its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

When an actress takes off her clothes onscreen but a nursing mother is told to leave, what message do we send about the roles of women? In some ways we’re as committed to the old...

The problem… is emblematic of what hasn’t changed during the equal opportunity revolution of the last 20 years. Doors opened; opportunities evolved. Law, institutions, corporations moved forward. But many minds did not.

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a...

I prize my downtime, count on it as a writer, a parent, a person. Sometimes I think of Woody Allen’s remark about masturbation, that it is sex with someone he loves. I feel as though...

But it’s important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.

Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go...

There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.

Ignorant free speech often works against the speaker. That is one of several reasons why it must be given rein instead of suppressed.

Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it...

I know the difference now between dedication and infatuation. That doesn’t mean I don’t still get an enormous kick out of infatuation;: the exciting ephemera, the punch in the stomach, the adrenaline to the heart.

The victim mentality may be the last uncomplicated thing about life in America.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.

I have a cat, the pet that ranks just above a throw pillow in terms of required responsibility.

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers’ incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are...

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.

I’ve discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.