Notes on grief — I’ve been thinking about my memory lately. How it works and why it makes mistakes. Every once in a while, for example, I hear a truck coming up our hill that growls and chuffs in the same register and pitch as my dad’s old maroon Ford, that dented dinosaur, and…

I’ve been avoiding silence lately. More than usual. I’m becoming, or have already become, one of those people who leaves the television on for sound, who always has a podcast in her ears, who never drives without the radio. I don’t like this. It’s not how I think of myself…

I hope she sees a woman unafraid of the shadows — I believe in the adage you can’t be what you can’t see. So I make a point to let my daughter see these five things: My Body Unadorned Getting dressed, thin, wintry morning light slanting through the window and illuminating my freckles, stretch marks, a long scar, shapely unshaved legs…

I was recently asked to speak to a group of second and third-year law students studying the intersection of law and love. Yes, you read that right: law and love. Odd bedfellows! Until you dip below the surface. Here’s what I told them. I came to law school in 2008…

Till death do us part. But death of what? Death used to come early. Life expectancy in colonial America was about 25 years. By the 1900s, it was only 45. For most of the history of marriage, till death meant a handful of years, maybe a decade. Now, when we…

The amount of rejection is staggering. It’s a constant drumbeat. It’s a deluge. It’s drinking water from a firehose, lips right up against the cold blast. I published a book last summer with Simon & Schuster, which is to say, a major publisher — as an unknown writer, snagging them…