When I’d RSVPed for tonight, I hadn’t expected to be the youngest by three-plus decades. To be honest, I hadn’t expected anything. I didn’t have the mental capacity. The excitement over my first house party...

Sometimes you don’t get a second chance. You need to take a chance when you have the opportunity. Always.

Let them Teach,Let them learn,let them pray,for the world is theirs.

And some people have less star appeal than others, but sometimes they shine far brighter than those with more.

Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that’s a shame–I’d make a really cute animated creature.

I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into doing so, I taste only shame. I...

What have the Chinese got on us?” she declared. And I agreed. The Chinese revere their elderly. If they could live happily with multiple generations under one roof, so could we.

It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled...

You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.

Everything I write is a rebound.

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in...

[My father] was handsome and tanned and smelled wonderful, like a mix of the ocean and fresh-cut grass, except when he smoked his pipe, which also smelled wonderful, as how I thought wisdom must smell,...

I am not enough in myself; I can barely make it through buying milk and school supplies. Thank goodness there is a Guardian to come before me and throw off the dark.

Within that quiet little girl with no apparent needs lived a person with a great imagination. In that shell I lived and grew and planned, until there emerged a way to pull all the loose...

I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat.That was until I became one…

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. …We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of...

The world is full of broken people who think they are surrounded by whole people.

It was as if we’d known each other for a thousand years.

In 2005, my mad half, HER was born… ME & HER: a Memoir of Madness, 2012.

My mother taught me that an important word in any language is while. while one thing is happening so is another. While someone is in darkness another is in daylight.While person dies another is born.

This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to...

Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.

I’m pretty sure Number 1 wasn’t even aware that he was using a man’s deadliest weapon against women. He exposed his vulnerability. Over the years, I would repeat a pattern of chronically caving to that...

He would never admit it, but he did have a heart of gold under all that crud.Solid, hard, impenetrable gold, but still gold, nonetheless.

Sometimes I feel she hasn’t left…especially when I wear the photo charm necklace with her picture in it. I can’t tell you how many young men have stared into that picture and the reaction is...

Even sentenced to twenty-five years in prison Ted didn’t get what he deserved. Maybe his prison mates would give it to him.

Have I mentioned the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, and the collapse of a section of the Bay Bridge, or the Oakland ‘firestorm’ of 1991? No need. There are already there, in my narratives that...

I considered not getting up, but recognized the pain of staying down was worse than the pain of attempting to stand.

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the “I” that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

I realized that I was okay with myself. I was quirky and withdrawn and loud, but I liked that. I smiled at strangers without thinking they were going to attack me and drag me into...

Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you’re like me, when you just sit quietly, just...

once ruffle-skirted vanity table where I primped at thirteen, opening drawers to a private chaos of eyeshadows lavender teal sky-blue, swarms of hair pins pony tail fasteners, stashes of powders, colonies of tiny lipsticks (p.39)

The Brit’s face shares a heritage with a junkyard butt-sniffing mutt. It’s a hard-earned moonshine mug, dotted with a hairy mole that looks like a rat’s been gnawing on it. His beard looks like a...

Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer!

When facing a decision that stands a 50/50 chance of being correct, the choice made will be wrong 80% of the time. Rick Coxen

I have never experienced writers block and I’ve written every day since June 1972. But I have experienced the need to get up and walk around, eat ice cream, let ideas percolate, forget the story...

That night I slept like a baby. When I woke the next morning I knew I was going to smoke heroin again. Everything that day was enjoyable: sitting on the bus, working all day –...

So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it

Because when you’re a 23-year old party girl who has to pee you don’t really think about the possibility that your nerdy bouncer friend might suddenly start acting like a trench-coated pedophile who flashes kids...

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees.

We didn’t last long after that. His room was trashed the second time I stayed there. Not that I’m neat. I knew he was. I miss him. But he knew how to hurt me with...

Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.

A memoir, at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are.

I don’t understand this–when people love you so much they are willing to get rid of you. I think if I loved someone that much I’d want to stay with them. It doesn’t make sense...

Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

One thing I’ve noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you’re sober–if you’re alert,...

Father, be near as we are surrounded by this cloud of deep suffering. Open our eyes to see that you are all things, the light and the darkness, not only those things that seem good...

I journeyed alone for almost ten years before I found home. Adoptions are like very delicate gardening with transplants and grafts. Mine took hold, rooted, and bloomed, even though there were inevitable adjustments to the...