autism is more like retina patterns than measles

Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.

Having a blood family means suddenly revising a definition of family that I have, over many years, learned to accept. How can I hold both concepts in my mind or find room for both families...

Have you ever gotten to a point where you looked at your own life, thought “Fu** this,” and reached for the economy-sized Valium? Ah, suicide. So dark and seductive.

Work hard. “Suit yourself, then you’ll know at least one person is pleased.

Can they admit it? And will they let me admit it too?

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family,...

As Samson demonstrated, going bald ruins lives.

All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life...

A memoir is an invitation into another person’s privacy.

Also retains value longer.”Knowing the sexual perversity about to transpire, I couldn’t reconcile that I was suddenly in an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Granted, I didn’t know from normal pre–group sex discussion topics,...

I learned in therapy the word “No” is a complete sentence.

Express yourself, Express your life, Express the Moment, Live the life.

— Margot Page

The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear...

The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.

I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

Maybe being broken helps you become a better person.

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The...

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

As we travel in time and on Equator, we will find our souls and then move in time towards time.

It seemed as if the mountains, wave after wave of them, were like the sea, going outward forever into distance, till, far away, they became engulfed in clouds, and joined—mountain and sky in one. Standing...

Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants,...

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and...

We human beings are at once delicate and intricate and temporal like the tulips in an April field and sturdy, resilient and enduring as Mt. Rainier when the will inspires us. We are individual miracles,...

His laugh is made of porch swings and lemonade.

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.

You have what it takes! Believe! You are the one with the dream. You own it. And you will walk through the open doors. Nothing can stop you.. Risk, even if you make mistakes. So...

Facts you can bend. Memories are much stronger things.

Your past doesn’t dictate what your future will be.

Shut your mouth – there’s a bus coming.

confessional.” She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much – it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic’s...

It wasn’t really a loud-mouthed, hyperactive little pig-tailed blonde that made Carl cringe. It was what I represented. While his upbringing was battered humiliation, I was spoiled, doted on, and spoon-fed by the world. I...

All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along.

He loves me, he loves me not. How many flowers must I kill before he loves me?” ~He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

I had received a t-shirt from my best friend Veronica at my police academy graduation. It reads, ‘Throw your donut in the opposite direction and the cops won’t get you.’ I love wearing that t-shirt.

What character with any sense of aesthetics desires a cradle-to-grave account of himself? That’s so passé, so nineteenth-century.

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where...

My handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill.

I know what it’s like to sleep in fear, to starve myself to be worthy, to be ashamed of my voice, to want to sleep forever. To question why I deserve to live.

Acts of love, for me, are leaps of bravery.

I write so that my handful of pebbles, cast daily into still waters, will produce a ripple.

Tatiana is a ridiculously curvy thing of dreams, with smooth succulent thighs, long strawberry blond cascading beneath a teal bandana, and a nympho sparkle in her eyes that says pick me, lick me, spank me,...

As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn’t even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging...

.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike–“I’m...

In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.

I’ve been a storyteller since I was six years old when my mother had her first series of electroshock therapy treatments. I made up stories to keep my sisters quiet while mom slept.” Dear Deb”I...

guilt” didn’t belong in the same sentence unless, say, you were referring to how you felt about the starving children in Africa.

He wasn’t a great man, but he had a great life.