In my early to mid-20s, a fear of confrontation made it difficult for me to end relationships in a mature or even quasi-sane way. Instead, I would hang on resentfully, praying that my doomed beau...

There’s a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of “mind expansion” or “warm healing energy.” I don’t like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my...

[Date rape is a major alcohol-related problem that schools don’t advertise and U.S. News & World Report doesn’t mention in its annual college issue. But administrators and counselors deal with it every year. The University...

Why is Kris Jenner a powerhouse? Because some part of us confuses fame and infamy, too. If she really bothered us half as much as we claim she does, we’d look away and stop feeding...

We are taught to believe it’s bad to be angry, or at least it’s not good. That’s not the case all throughout the world. People are more open and not embarrassed about it. For instance...

I’m sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, “Yeah, but studies say...

I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings. Afterward,...

It’s no wonder the narcissistic mother will always have a place in literature: she’s a freak of nature.

But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous.

What makes a narcissistic mother so scary? Her absolute power and controlling influence. A narcissistic mother is your only ‘friend,’ at least until you’re old enough to go to school.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It’s just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

Since I’ve quit drinking, I’m not sure I’ve found the good life, but I’ve certainly uncovered a better one.

I think, for one, we have to really accept that anger is a normal human emotion that can be a positive force for change.

Reading Poe was like a near-death experience, the kind that makes you feel fragile and free in its wake. I felt almost as though I’d scared myself alive.

I don’t know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it’s always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and...

I think what I learned in research is that as Americans, we’re very distrustful of anger. We’re not sure if we should repress it. The idea that anger is supposed to be controlled is American,...

That’s the thing about social drinking: In the end, it’s the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you’re there, really...

If mothers are our first teachers, then having a narcissistic one teaches us that human closeness is terrifying, and the world is a heartless, inconsistent place.

I think when you’re 14 years old, I think you’re sort of looking for markers that prove you’re an adult and you’re independent of your parents.

I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight…I agree.

My parents always swore that in my childhood they had to let me win at board games. If, by the lucky stroke of the plastic wheel, my father would accidentally beat me at Candy Land,...

America, ever the narcissistic mother, prefers baby bumps to children and expectant mothers to full-fledged bum-and-nose-wiping ones.

It’s meant I will act like less of an asshole, but feel much more like one.

I do think anger is so difficult for women. Girls think it undermines their femininity; it’s not very ladylike.

Having a child doesn’t make a woman a mother any more than owning a paintbrush makes her Frida Kahlo.

I’d written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one’s own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I’d made a habit–and eventually a profession–of...

I really think, at this point in time, it does have to be all of us who deal with that as culture. It has to be students and parents and administrations and the government.

I have been a ballerina, a cheerleader and a sorority girl. I was the girliest girl alive.

As long as we depend on other women for self-esteem, using them as bad examples or fantasy versions – special, powerful – of ourselves, they remain stuck in a narcissistic version of themselves, too.

My demeanor isn’t that of a woman enraged. To see me slumped, glassy-eyed, holding a sandwich someone has cut for me into four “manageable” pieces, a person might tell you I look much more like...

It was drinking and doing stupid things, or drinking and having scary things happen, but then drinking again to … mask the memories of it.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

I would never make up a character who didn’t exist or an event that didn’t transpire. If you’re a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

I’m trying to figure out precisely which character flaw might be responsible for my latest life failure.

I’m getting there. I’m catching up, I think. I feel like I have a ways to go.

My short stature may have something to do with my tendency to shout when enraged. How else is anyone going to hear me way down here?