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Being Accused Of Making Money By Selling Sex In Hollywood, Home Of The Casting Couch And The Gratuitous Nude Scene, Is So Rich With Irony That It's A Better Subject For A Comic Novel Than A Column.... On One Coast The Cops Are Busting Sex Workers On Eighth Avenue, Dragging Them Downtown To Night Court Where They Pay The Fine And Go Right Back To Their Corner; On Another They're Charging Heidi Fleiss With Pandering In A Town In Which The Verb Is An Art Form.

-Anna Quindlen

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Being Accused Of Making

Anna Quindlen

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Being Accused Of Making Money By Selling Sex In Hollywood, Home Of The Casting Couch And The Gratuitous Nude Scene, Is So Rich With Irony That It's A Better Subject For A Comic Novel Than A Column.... On One Coast The Cops Are Busting Sex Workers On Eighth Avenue, Dragging Them Downtown To Night Court Where They Pay The Fine And Go Right Back To Their Corner; On Another They're Charging Heidi Fleiss With Pandering In A Town In Which The Verb Is An Art Form.

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London Has The Trick Of Making Its Past, Its Long Indelible Past, Always A Part Of Its Present. And For That Reason It Will Always Have Meaning For The Future, Because Of All It Can Teach About Disaster, Survival, And Redemption. It Is All There In The Streets. It Is All There In The Books.

This Is Why I Had Children: To Offer Them A Perfect Dream Of Childhood That Can Fill Their Souls As They Grow Older.

The Reason Child Care Is Such A Loaded Issue Is That When We Talk About It, We Are Always Tacitly Talking About Motherhood. And When We're Talking About Motherhood We're Always Tacitly Assuming That Child Care Must Be A Very Dim Second To Full-time Mother Care.

Adolescence Is A Tough Time For Parent And Child Alike. It Is A Time Between: Between Childhood And Maturity, Between Parental Protection And Personal Responsibility, Between Life Stage- Managed By Grown-ups And Life Privately Held.

Life Is Not So Much About Beginnings And Endings As It Is About Going On And On And On. It Is About Muddling Through The Middle.

I Would Even Go To Washington, Which Is Saying Something For Me, Just To Glimpse Jane Q. Public, Being Sworn In As The First Female President Of The United States, While Her Husband Holds The Bible And Wears A Silly Pill Box Hat And Matching Coat.

Whether Talking About Addiction, Taxation [on Cigarettes] Or Education [about Smoking], There Is Always At The Center Of The Conversation An Essential Conundrum: How Come We're Selling This Deadly Stuff Anyway?

It's Only Before Realities Set In That We Can Treasure Our Delusions.

I Hadn't Written A Love Story Before And I Hadn't Written A Novel With A Happy Ending Before.

Sometimes I Remind Myself That I Almost Skipped The Party, That I Almost Went To A Different College, That The Whim Of A Minute Could Have Changed Everything And Everyone. Our Lives, So Settled, So Specific, Are Built On Happenstance.

In The Family Sandwich, The Older People And The Younger Ones Can Recognize One Another As The Bread. Those In The Middle Are, For A Time, The Meat.

What Usually Happens Is That When I'm Nearing The End Of One Novel A Vague Idea About What I Want To Do Next Begins To Present Itself To Me In Terms Of Theme. And I Would Say Over About The Next Six To Eight Months, Usually As I'm Out Power Walking In The Morning, Or When I'm Cooking At Night, Or When I'm Driving In The Car, The People Who Might Embody Those Themes Take On A Sharper And Sharper Focus. And There Comes This Sort Of Critical Mass Moment When They Actually Start To Do Things In My Head.

Your Hair Isn't Quite Right And Maybe You're A Size Bigger Than You Should Be And On And On And On. I Think There Comes A Moment When You've Matured To The Point Where You Suddenly Think, Nonsense. I Am Fine Just The Way I Am.

A Week In The Hospital She Had Told Us. A Hysterectomy, She Had Said. It Had Seemed Unremarkable To Me In A Woman Of Forty-six Long Finished With Childbearing, Although Every Day That I Grow Older I Realize There Is Never Anything Unremarkable About Losing Any Part Of What Makes You Female - A Breast, A Womb, A Child, A Man.

Women Who Marry Early Are Often Overly Enamored Of The Kind Of Man Who Looks Great In Wedding Pictures And Passes The Maid Of Honor His Telephone Number.

Parents Have Railed Against Shelters Near Schools, But No One Has Made Any Connection Between The Crazed Consumerism Of Our Kids And Their Elders' Cold Unconcern Toward Others. Maybe The Homeless Are Not The Only Ones Who Need To Spend Time In These Places To Thaw Out.

Ideas Are Like Pizza Dough, Made To Be Tossed Around.

There May Perhaps Be A New Generation Of Doctors Horrified By Lacerations, Infections, Women Who Have Douched With Kitchen Cleanser. What An Irony It Would Be If Fanatics Continued To Kill And Yet It Was The Apathy And Silence Of The Medical Profession That Most Wounded The Ability To Provide What Is, After All, A Medical Procedure.

All Of The Qualities That You Need To Be A Good Opinion Columnist Tend To Be Qualities That Aren't Valued In Women.

The 1992 Us Olympic Basketball Team Is The Best Sports Team Ever, The Equivalent Of Rounding Up The Greatest American Writers Of The Last Century Or So And Watching Them Collaborate: 'ok, Twain, You Do The Dialogue And Hand Off To Faulkner. He'll Do The Interior Monologue. Hemingway Will Edit - No, Don't Make That Face, You Know You Overwrite. And Be Nice To Cheever. He's Young, But He's Got A Good Ear. Wharton And Cather Can't Play - They're Girls.'

Part Of The Problem With A War On Poverty Today Is That Many Americans Have Decided That Being Poor Is A Character Defect, Not An Economic Condition.

I'm Not Making Light Of Prayers Here, But Of So-called School Prayer, Which Bears As Much Resemblance To Real Spiritual Experienceas That Freeze-dried Astronaut Food Bears To A Nice Standing Rib Roast. From What I Remember Of Praying In School, It Was Almost An Insult To God, A Rote Exercise In Moving Your Mouth While Daydreaming Or Checking Out The Cutest Boy In The Seventh Grade That Was A Far, Far Cry From Soul-searching.

A Finished Person Is A Boring Person.

I Think At Every Moment In The Last Probably 100 Years, When The Institutional Church Had The Opportunity To Do The Right Thing, They Did The Wrong Thing. They're A Dying Institution In Many Parts Of The World Because They Refuse To Ordain Women Or Married People. And Now They're A Dying Institution Because Some Of Their Members Did Enormous Harm To Young People And Instead Of Responding Aggressively With Humility, And With Love, And With The Confession Of Wrongdoing, They Tried To Spin It As Though They Were A Political Party, And That's Just Deplorable.

I Don't Have To Listen To The Gospel On Sunday To Know The Stories Of The New Testament. They Inform So Much Of What I Write That They're Practically Like A News Scrim That Goes Through My Brain 24/7.

Raising Children Is A Spur-of-the-moment, Seat-of-the-pants Sort Of Deal, As Any Parent Knows, Particularly After An Adult Child Says That His Most Searing Memory Consists Of An Offhand Comment In The Car On The Way To Second Grade That The Parent Cannot Even Dimly Recall.

The Most Sacred Business Of Judges Is Not To Ratify The Will Of The Majority But To Protect The Minority From Its Tyranny.

The Misdeeds Of Ordinary Men Can Be Buried With Them, And Their Lives Described In Half-truths That Are Really Half-lies. But Not A Public Man. Particularly Not This One.

But Never Fear, Gentlemen; Castration Was Really Not The Point Of Feminism, And We Women Are Too Busy Eviscerating One Another To Take You On.

I Grew Up In The Suburbs Of Philadelphia And One Of The Things I Like To Say Is That One Of The Biggest Impediments I Had To Becoming A Successful Writer Is I Had A Very Happy Childhood.

In Life, The Classroom Is Everywhere. The Exam Comes At The Very End.

Being Accused Of Making Money By Selling Sex In Hollywood, Home Of The Casting Couch And The Gratuitous Nude Scene, Is So Rich With Irony That It's A Better Subject For A Comic Novel Than A Column.... On One Coast The Cops Are Busting Sex Workers On Eighth Avenue, Dragging Them Downtown To Night Court Where They Pay The Fine And Go Right Back To Their Corner; On Another They're Charging Heidi Fleiss With Pandering In A Town In Which The Verb Is An Art Form.

Figuring Out Who You Are Is The Whole Point Of The Human Experience.

I Think I'm Like Most Novelists In That My Books Have Gotten Farther And Farther Away From Autobiography The Longer I've Been Writing Them.

There Is Little Premium In Poetry In A World That Thinks Of Pound And Whitman As A Weight And A Sampler, Not An Ezra, A Walt, A Thing Of Beauty, A Joy Forever.

No One Thinks Anything Silly Is Suitable When They Are An Adolescent. Such An Enormous Share Of Their Own Behavior Is Silly That They Lose All Proper Perspective On Silliness, Like A Baker Who Is Nauseated By The Sight Of His Own Eclairs. This Provides Another Good Argument For The Emerging Theory That The Best Use Of Cryogenics Is To Freeze All Human Beings When They Are Between The Ages Of Twelve And Nineteen.

If God Had Meant Harvard Professors To Appear In People Magazine, She Wouldn't Have Invented The New York Review Of Books.

[i]n Contrast To The Common Belief That They Are The World's Greatest Cynics, The Best Journalists Are The World's Great Idealists. They Have Experienced Firsthand The Great Soothing Balance Of Human Existence. For Every Disgrace There Is Triumph, For Every Wrong There Is A Moment Of Justice, For Every Funeral A Wedding, For Every Obituary A Birth Announcement.

For Many Years, Despite What I Thought Were Really Punitive Decisions About Women In The Church, I Stayed And Stayed And Stayed. I Kept Saying To Myself, "the Catholic Church Is My Church, And By God, I'm Going To Stay Here, Despite What The Hierarchy Does."

An The President Bring Out The Voters Who Were So Enthusiastic About Him In 2008 And Seem A Little Disenchanted Now? Can He Bring Out Young People? Can He Bring Out Latinos? Can He Bring Out Those White Suburban Moms?

It's What The Taliban Does In Afghanistan, It's What Gets Done In The Middle East, And It's Clearly Something That Certain Mainly Conservative Groups In The United States Would Like To Do. They Miss The Good Old Days, When Men Were Men And Women Were Nothing.

It's So Much Easier To Write A Resume Than To Craft A Spirit.

The Separation Of Church And State Grew Out Of A Desire, Not So Much To Protect Government From Religion, But To Protect Religion From Government.

Stereotypes Fall In The Face Of Humanity. You Toodle Along, Thinking That All Gay Men Wear Leather After Dark And Should Never, Ever Be Permitted Around A Little League Field. And Then One Day Your Best Friend From College, The One Your Kids Adore, Comes Out To You.

However, There Will Be A Republican Party Platform That Will Coalesce Around Their Convention. Unless I Miss My Guess, It Will Be Considerably More Conservative On These Issues, Perhaps Even Than Governor Romney Is, And I Think That That Will Give Americans A Clear Set Of Choices About All Issues, But About Women's Issues Too.

I Don't Know What I Would Do In The World Without [female Friends] For Advice, For Comfort, For Simply Knowing That There Is Someone Out There Who Knows Me As I Am, And Loves Me Despite And Because Of It.

Look Back, To Slavery, To Suffrage, To Integration And One Thing Is Clear. Fashions In Bigotry Come And Go. The Right Thing Lasts.

Down Time Is Where We Become Ourselves... A Hiatus That Passes For Boredom But Is Really The Quiet Moving Of The Wheels Inside That Fuel Creativity.

My Father Really, Really Pushed Me To Excel In A Way That I Resented For Years And Then Realized Had Really Worked For Me.

My Most Pronounced Writing Habit Is Trying Not To Write.

I Got A Fortune Cookie That Said, "to Remember Is To Understand." I Have Never Forgotten It. A Good Judge Remembers What It Was Like To Be A Lawyer. A Good Editor Remembers Being A Writer. A Good Parent Remembers What It Was Like To Be A Child.

Barack Obama Is The Kind Of Guy Who Likes To Do Things By Inches, He's The Kind Of Guy Who Likes To Build Consensus And Compromise.

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 Mother Of Young Children.

The Life You Have Led Doesn't Need To Be The Only Life You Have.

I Think That After A While You Realize That Your Husband Can't Be All Things To You And Certainly You Don't Want The Kids To Be All Things To You, Because That Would Be A Terrible Weight For Them; And That Where You Really Find Solace A Lot Of The Time Is With Your Girlfriends.

At The Same Time That You've Got To Open Yourself Up To The Fact That Experience Is Going To Teach You Year After Year, Decade After Decade. I Remember I Very Badly Wanted To Write A Newspaper Column When I Was Only 21 Years Old, And I Went To My Editor And Told Him That, And He Said, "you're A Really Good Writer, But You Haven't Lived Long Enough To Be Qualified To Live Out Loud."

Catastrophe Is Numerical. Loss Is Singular, One Beloved At A Time.

But While Ignorance Can Make You Insensitive, Familiarity Can Also Numb. Entering The Second Half-century Of An Information Age, Our Cumulative Knowledge Has Changed The Level Of What Appalls, What Stuns, What Shocks.

Ever Since The Evil Empire Turned Out To Be A Collection Of Third-world Countries, Americans Aligned On The Far Right Have Tried To Cast Gay Men And Lesbians As The New Enemy, Calculating Deviants Seducing The Nation's Young, Anti-avon Ladies Selling Sodomy Door-to-door. This Simply Won't Wash. Just As Seeing The Russians Up Close And Personal On Television Humanized Them, So Seeing The Lesbian Grandmother Of Two Little Girls Wearing Her Gold Medal With Pride Makes The Notion Of Otherness, Much Less Deviance, Silly And Ignorant.

That Is Supposed To Be The Rallying Cry Of Women In The Age Of Aids: No Condom, No Sex. But The Dirty Little Secret Is That The Rallying Cry Is A Whisper.... The Great Unspoken On The Heterosexual Aids Front Has Been How Behavior Is Still Determined By The Old Psychosexual Minuet Of The Sexes, The Lack Of Responsibility In Young Men And Of Assertiveness In Young Women.

When I'm Falling, My Girlfriends Are My Soft Landing.

I'm Very Optimistic. I Think If You Would Describe Me, My Pretty Consistent Affect Is That I'm A Pretty Happy Person.

If God Is Watching Us, As Some Believers Suggest, As Though We Were A Television Show And God Had A Lot Of Free Time, The Deity Would Surely Be Bemused By How Dumbed-down Devotion Has Sometimes Become In This So-called Modern Era. How Might An Omnipotent Being With The Long View Of History Respond To Those Who Visit The Traveling Exhibit Of A Grilled-cheese Sandwich, Sold On Ebay, That Is Said To Bear The Image Of The Virgin Mary? It Certainly Argues Against Intelligent Design, Or At Least Intelligent Design In Humans.

Cheese Sandwiches

I Really Feel Like I'm A Liberal Because I'm A Catholic, Because I Took The Words Of The New Testament To Heart.

My Home Was In A Pleasant Place Outside Of Philadelphia. But I Really Lived, Truly Lived, Somewhere Else. I Lived Within The Covers Of Books.

Over The Last Twenty Years, We've Changed The World Just Enough To Make It Radically Different, But Not Enough To Make It Work.

I Only Really Understand Myself, What I'm Really Thinking And Feelings, When I've Talked It Over With My Circle Of Female Friends. When Days Go By Without That Connection, I Feel Like A Radio Playing In An Empty Room.

Life Is So Messy That The Temptation To Straighten It Up Is Very Strong. And The Results Always Illusory.

Ignorant Free Speech Often Works Against The Speaker. That Is One Of Several Reasons Why It Must Be Given Rein Instead Of Suppressed.

Wow, So Much Of The Way I've Transacted My Life... So Much Of The Results That I'm Happy About Are Because Of What Daddy Did.

Keeping Kids Safe Is Sometimes A Delusion. The World Is A Perilous Place. Sometimes The Kitchen Is A Perilous Place.

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 For $100 Subject To Criminal Penalties?

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, Isn't It? You Know Where You Are And Where You Hope To Wind Up. It's The Getting There That's Challenging.

It Is Difficult For Me To Imagine The Same Dedication To Women's Rights On The Part Of The Kind Of Man Who Lives In Partnership With Someone He Likes And Respects, And The Kind Of Man Who Considers Breast-augmentation Surgery Self-improvement.

I Conveniently Forgot To Remember That People Only Have Two Hands, Or, As Another Parent Once Said Of Having A Third Child, It's Time For A Zone Defense Instead Of Man-to-man.

More Than A Decade After Our Fellow Citizens Began Bedding Down On The Sidewalks, Their Problems Continue To Seem So Intractable That We Have Begun To Do Psychologically What Government Has Been Incapable Of Doing Programmatically. We Bring The Numbers Down--not By Solving The Problem, But By Deciding It's Their Own Damn Fault.

All Of Life Like A Series Of Tableaux, And In The Living We Missed So Much, Hid So Much, Left So Much Undone And Unsaid.

Like Cellulite Creams Or Hair-loss Tonics, Capital Punishment Is One Of Those Panaceas That Isn't. Only It Costs A Whole Lot More.

So Carry Your Courage In An Easily Accessible Place, The Way You Do Your Cellphone Or Your Wallet. You May Still Falter Or Fail, But You Always Know That You Pushed Hard And Aimed High. Take A Leap Of Faith. Fear Not. Courage Is The Ultimate Career Move.

I Don't Understand How People Learn To Live In The World If They Haven't Had Siblings. Everything I Learned About Negotiation, Territoriality, Coexistence, Dislike, Inbred Differences And Love Despite Knowledge I Learned From My Four Younger Siblings.

When Men Do The Dishes, It's Called Helping. When Women Do The Dishes, It Is Called Life.

[after My Mother Died, I Had A Feeling That Was] Not Unlike The Homesickness That Always Filled Me For The First Few Days When I Went To Stay At My Grandparents'' House, And Even, I Was Stunned To Discover, During The First Few Months Of My Freshman Year At College. It Was Not Really The Home My Mother Had Made That I Yearned For. But I Was Sick In My Soul For That Greater Meaning Of Home That We Understand Most Purely When We Are Children, When It Is A Metaphor For All Possible Feelings Of Security, Of Safety, Of What Is Predictable, Gentle, And Good In Life.

While We Pay Lip Service To The Virtues Of Reading, The Truth Is That There Is Still In Our Culture Something That Suspects Those Who Read Too Much, Whatever Reading Too Much Means, Of Being Lazy, Aimless Dreamers, People Who Need To Grow Up And Come Outside To Where Real Life Is, Who Think Themselves Superior In Their Separateness.

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 Not Imperfect, How Can We Equal Them?

I'll Tell You The Truth - I Went To A Women's College, Barnard, The Most Selective College For Women In America Today. If There's One Thing I Came Out Of Barnard With, Because It Was A Women's College And A Great Institution Of Higher Education, It Was Fearlessness.

I Always Have Music On Unless I'm Reading Aloud, Which I Always Do Before I Hand Anything In. It's The Only Way To Know If A Sentence Really Works, Without Clunks Or Cul-de-sac Clauses.

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 They Get From The Culture And Even From Their Schools.

When You Look At The Women That Have Made A Real Difference In The World Throughout History, What They’ve Done Has Almost Always Been Defined By Fearlessness. That’s Something I Came To At A Certain Point; I Wish I’d Come To It Younger. Stop Looking Over Your Shoulder — There’s Nobody Who Matters Back There.

Those Of Us Who Read Because We Love It More Than Anything, Who Feel About Bookstores The Way Some People Feel About Jewelers.

We Take Our Vitamins, We Go To Exercise Class, We Put On Our Seat Belts. And Then Something Blindsides Us And Gives The Lie To Our Carefully Constructed Facade Of Safety.

There's Something Undeniable About The Posture Of A Person Trying Not To Acknowledge Your Existance

I'm Going To Live Long Enough To Live In An America That Will Assume Universal Health Care Is A Basic Right. That Will Be Amusing And Terrific.

The Pursuit Of Otherness, The Sense That We Are Somehow Different Than Our Brothers And Sisters, No Matter Where We Find Them, Allows For All The Other Great Evils: Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, Violence Against Gay People And Against Women.

It Makes Me Angry To Think That . . . Female Sanitation Workers Will Spend Their Days Doing A Job Most Of Their Co-workers Think They Can't Handle, And Then They Will Go Home And Do Another Job Most Of Their Co-workers Don't Want.

If I Had To Guess What The New Etch-a-sketch Picture Is Going To Be Like, It's Going To Be Considerably Less To The Right. Romney Has Backed Himself Into A Couple Of Corners That I Don't Think Will Serve Him Well In The General Election, The Main One Being Very Harsh Stands On Immigration, Which I Think Are Not Only Short-sighted But To My Mind Immoral.

Get A Life In Which You Notice The Smell Of Salt Water Pushing Itself On A Breeze Over The Dunes, A Life In Which You Stop And Watch How A Red-tailed Hawk Circles Over A Pond And A Stand Of Pines. Get A Life In Which You Pay Attention To The Baby As She Scowls With Concentration When She Tried To Pick Up A Cheerio With Her Thumb And First Finger.

We Almost Manage To Forget That Things Happen That We Don't Anticipate.

I'm Writing This Memoir From The Perspective Of Somebody Who's Prosperous And Has Means. Having Said That, One Of The Things That I Think I Discovered About Those Additional Years Is That I Don't Think They Really Are Added To The End Of Life.

Stereotypes Fall In The Face Of Humanity. We Human Beings Are Best Understood One At A Time.

I Do Think That People Who Are Now In Their Sixties And Their Seventies Are Living A Different Kind Of Life Than Their Grandparents Led, Even In These Tough Times. A Lot Of Them Are More Active, A Lot Of Them Are Still Working, Which Was Not The Case When Our Grandparents Were In Their Sixties.

There Is A Lot Of Talk Now About Metal Detectors And Gun Control. Both Are Good Things. But They Are No More A Solution Than Forks And Spoons Are A Solution To World Hunger.

I Realized That, While I Would Never Be My Mother Nor Have Her Life, The Lesson She Had Left Me Was That It Was Possible To Love And Care For A Man And Still Have At Your Core A Strength So Great That You Never Even Needed To Put It On Display.

We're Tortured, A Lot Of Us, Believe Me.

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.

Each Instance Of Sexual Harassment Has To Be Judged On Its Merits. Facts, Timing, Motives, Credibility: All Must Be Considered Before We Make Up Our Own Minds What To Believe.

Ask Any Woman How She Makes It Through The Day, And She May Mention Her Calendar, Her To-do Lists, Her Babysitter. But If You Push Her On How She Really Makes It Through Her Day, She Will Mention Her Girlfriends.

Don't Ever Forget The Words On A Postcard That My Father Sent Me Last Year: "if You Win The Rat Race, You're Still A Rat.

I'm Just Remembering Myself At 22 Or 23. I Was All Engine And No Steering. (laughter) I Had The Wheels But I Had No Steering. I Do Think It's True That When You're Younger, You're More Likely To Listen To All The Naysayers, And People Are Always Telling You How You Ought To Behave And What Kind Of Job You Should Get And How You Should Look.

Now The Baby Boomers, I.e., Us, Are Getting Older, And Were Suddenly Discovering That There Are Great Things About Getting Older. You Have Time For Your Friendships And You Appreciate Them In Ways That You Didn't Before.

Decorating Consists Mostly Of Building Enough Bookshelves.

Independent Bookstores

It Often Seems, Looking Back, That The Unexpected Comes To Define Us, The Paths We Didn't See Coming And May Have Wandered Down By Mistake. The Older We Get The More Willing We Are To Follow Those, To Surprise Ourselves.

Ideas Are Like Pizza Dough, Made To Be Tossed Around, And Nearly Every Book Represents What My Son's Third Grade Teacher Refers To As A "teachable Moment.

Here Is One Of The Worst Things About Having Someone You Love Die: It Happens Again Every Single Morning.

Someone You Love

My Sister Is A Public School Teacher. She Makes Far Far Less Money Than I Do, And Gets Almost No Public Attention For Her Work. Yet I Believe What She Does Is Infinitely More Important And More Difficult Than What I Do.

Books Are The Plane, And The Train, And The Road. They Are The Destination, And The Journey. They Are Home.

All Parents Should Be Aware That When They Mock Or Curse Gay People, They May Be Mocking Or Cursing Their Own Child.

The Truth About Your Own Life Is Not Always Easy To Accept, And Sometimes Hasn't Even Occurred To You.

I Haven't Seen So Much Tippy-toeing Around Since The Last Time I Went To The Ballet. When Members Of The Arts Community Were Askedthis Week About One Of Their Biggest Benefactors, Philip Morris, And Its Requests That They Lobby The New York City Council On The Company's Behalf, The Pas De Deux Of Self- Justification Was So Painstakingly Choreographed That It Constituted A Performance All By Itself.

You Realize That Especially When You're Writing A Book Like This, Looking Back On Your Life, That There's Just Such A Depth Of Understanding You Acquire Over Time With The Help Of The People Who Love You That That's When You Can Really Get Down To What You Really Think And Believe.

So You're Getting Squeezed At Both Sides. You're Taking Care Of Your Mom And Dad And You're Still Doing Caregiving With Your Kids, Which Is Not Easy. But I Think Overall, There's A Level Of Satisfaction That Might Be Unparalleled.

Our Love Of Lockstep Is Our Greatest Curse, The Source Of All That Bedevils Us. It Is The Source Of Homophobia, Xenophobia, Racism, Sexism, Terrorism, Bigotry Of Every Variety And Hue, Because It Tells Us There Is One Right Way To Do Things, To Look, To Behave, To Feel, When The Only Right Way Is To Feel Your Heart Hammering Inside You And To Listen To What Its Timpani Is Saying.

One Of The Interesting Things I Discovered, Talking About Your Grandmother, Is I Did A Search Of My Uses Of The Word "elderly" In My Copy Over The Years, And You Will Not Be Surprised To Hear That The Older I Got The Less Often I Used The Word Elderly In Print.

All Of Us Want To Do Well. But If We Do Not Do Good, Too, Then Doing Well Will Never Be Enough.

Your Kids Are Launched. You Love Your Work But You Understand How To Place It In The Panorama Of The Rest Of Your Life. There's This Line In The Book, And When I Wrote It I Thought Yes, That's It - If You Think Of Life As A Job, Maybe By The Time You Get To, Say, In My Case, 60, You've Finally Gotten Good At It.

I Was A Kid Who Sometimes Got In Trouble Because I Couldn't Keep My Mouth Shut, Which Turned Out To Be An Advantage When I Became An Opinion Columnist.

What Had I Expected Of The First Child? Everything. Rocket Scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated Hitter. We Talked Wisely At Cocktail Parties About The Sad Mistake Our Mothers Had Made In Pinning All Their Hopes And Dreams On Us. We Were Full Of It.

Somewhere Between A Third And A Quarter Of All People Living In America Today Were Born Between 1946 And 1965 And If You Think You're Tired Of Hearing About Us, You Should Try Being One Of Us.

Sometimes Change Came All At Once, With A Sound Like A Fire Taking Hold Of Dry Wood And Paper, With A Roar That Rose Around You So You Couldn't Hear Yourself Think. And Then, When The Roar Died Down, Even When The Fires Were Damped, Everything Was Different.

I Was Very Driven, Very Focused, Very Ambitious. I Mean, When I Look Back On Myself In My 20s, Part Of Me Just Cringes.

There Are Those Of Us Who Believe That Under Certain Conditions The Cruelest Thing You Can Do To People You Love Is To Force Them To Live. There Are Those Of Us Who Define Living Not By Whether The Heart Beats And The Lungs Lift But Whether The Spirit Is There, Whether The Music Box Plays.

All Reading Is Good Reading. And All Reading Of Jane Austen And Charles Dickens Is Sublime Reading.

The Cairo Conferenceis About A Complicated Web Of Education And Employment, Consumption And Poverty, Development And Health Care. It Is Also About Whether Governments Will Follow Where Women Have So Clearly Led Them, Toward Safe, Simple And Reliable Choices In Family Planning. While Cairo Crackles With Conflict, In The Homes Of The World The Orthodoxies Have Been Duly Heard, And Roundly Ignored.

The Statue Of Liberty Is Meant To Be Shorthand For A Country So Unlike Its Parts That A Trip From California To Indiana Should Require A Passport.

And Yet We Constantly Reclaim Some Part Of That Primal Spontaneity Through The Youngest Among Us, Not Only Through Their Sorrow And Anger But Simply Through Everyday Discoveries, Life Unwrapped. To See A Child Touch The Piano Keys For The First Time, To Watch A Small Body Slice Through The Surface Of The Water In A Clean Dive, Is To Experience The Shock, Not Of The New, But Of The Familiar Revisited As Though It Were Strange And Wonderful.

February Is A Suitable Month For Dying. Everything Around Is Dead, The Trees Black And Frozen So That The Appearance Of Green Shoots Two Months Hence Seems Preposterous, The Ground Hard And Cold, The Snow Dirty, The Winter Hateful, Hanging On Too Long.

The Joy Of Someone Who Had Been A Reader All Her Life, Whose World Had Been Immeasurably Enlarged By The Words Of Others.

Kids And Violent Tv, Violent Tv And Violence, Violence And Kids. The Only People Missing From This Discussion Are The Parents. Where Are We? Gone. Abdicated.

My Father Expected His First Child To Be A Boy, And When It Didn't Turn Out That Way He Didn't Let The Fact Get In The Way Of A Good Story.

I Go Online All The Time, I Just Don't Read About Myself. I Read A Fashion Website Called Go Fug Yourself. I Actually Correspond With The Fug Girls And That's Great.

I Wondered Why I Hadn't Loved That Day More, Why I Hadn't Savored Every Bit Of It...why I Hadn't Known How Good It Was To Live So Normally, So Everyday. But You Only Know That, I Suppose, After It's Not Normal And Every Day Any Longer.

Life Is Made Up Of Moments, Small Pieces Of Glittering Mica In A Long Stretch Of Gray Cement. It Would Be Wonderful If They Came To Us Unsummoned, But Particularly In Lives As Busy As The Ones Most Of Us Lead Now, That Won’t Happen. We Have To Teach Ourselves How To Make Room For Them, To Love Them, And To Live, Really Live.

I Was Doing The Family Grocery Shopping Accompanied By Two Children, An Event I Hope To See Included In The Olympics In The Near Future.

And A Great Misunderstanding Is That Children Think Their Parents Are Grown-up, And Parents Feel Obliged To Act As If They Were.

I Do Not Like Football, Which I Think Of As A Game In Which Two Tractors Approach Each Other From Opposite Directions And Collide. Besides, I Have Contempt For A Game In Which Players Have To Wear So Much Equipment. Men Play Basketball In Their Underwear, Which Seems Just Right To Me.

Young Men Kill Someone For A Handful Of Coins, Then Are Remorseless, Even Casual: Hey, Man, Things Happen. And Their Parents Nab The Culprit: It Was The City, The Cops, The System, The Crowd, The Music. Anyone But Him. Anyone But Me.

Here Is The Real Domino Theory - Gay Man To Gay Man, Bisexual Man To Straight Woman, Addict Mother To Newborn Baby, They All Fall Down And Someday It Will Come To You.

Well, I'd Like To Think I Am, And I'd Also Like To Think That We're All Having A Lot More Fun Getting Older Than We Pretend. It Was Interesting To Me When I First Started Working On This Book That I'd Mentioned That I Was Writing A Memoir About Aging And Everybody Would Moan And Groan And Carry On.

On Social Welfare The Church Does So Much Good Around The World - Nuns Running Schools And Homeless Shelters, Priests Ministering To People Who Are In Crisis.

For Most Of My Life The Only Ceremonies I've Been To At Which Women Were The Stars Were Weddings. So I Like Weddings.

People Who Wish To Salute The Free And Independent Side Of Their Evolutionary Character Acquire Cats. People Who Wish To Pay Homage To Their Servile And Salivating Roots Own Dogs.

You Just Can't Tell Or Calibrate Motive Or Intelligence Or Sense. So I Don't Read Anything Unless Someone Tells Me That It's Really Smart Or Illuminating. I Don't Read Any Reviews Anymore And It's Been Really Liberating.

It Is So Easy To Waste Our Lives: Our Days, Our Hours, Our Minutes. It Is So Easy To Take For Granted The Pale New Growth On An Evergreen, The Sheen Of The Limestone On Fifth Avenue, The Colour Of Our Kids’ Eyes, The Way The Melody In A Symphony Rises And Falls And Disappears And Rises Again. It Is So Easy To Exist Instead Of Live. Unless You Know There Is A Clock Ticking.

People Ask Me All The Time If I'm From A Family Of Writers. The Literal Short Answer Is No, But My Father And His Brothers And Sisters And His Mother Are All People Who Would Sit Around With A Tom Collins And Tell Stories That Seemed To Get Better And Better Each Time They Told Them.

I Really Feel Like If You Can Get Past Your Fear, If You Can Say, "uh-uh, I'm Afraid To Do That And I'm Going To Do It Anyhow," That That's Really The Way To Have A Satisfying Life Moving Forward. I Think I Had That Kind Of Fearlessness Even As A Young Person. It Wasn't Tempered By Experience Or Wisdom, But It Took Me A Long Way.

So I Do Think Sometimes The Political Mechanism Is Completely Disconnected From The People. However, What I Will Say Is That History Tells Us That Whenever Things Start To Move Too Fast, Whenever Progress Makes People Feel A Little Breathless, One Of The Go-to Spots That Government, That The Ruling Powers That Society Goes To Is To Try To Repress Women.

Get A Life. A Real Life. Not A Manic Pursuit Of The Next Promotion, The Bigger Paycheck, The Larger House.

Choose The Kids. There Will Be Plenty Of Time Later To Choose Work.

I Hope Readers Will Do What I Do When I Read A Novel I Like: Talk In Ways That Will Illuminate Their Own Lives.

A Writer Is Always Working With Whatever She's Managed To Store In The Brainpan Or Puzzle Out About The World.

One Of The Things That Got Me On This Topic For This Book Was That When I Was Researching The Column I Wrote In 2009 Saying That I Was Stepping Down From My Column At "newsweek" Because I Wanted To Make Room For Newer, Fresh Voices Out There, I Discovered That In The Year I Was Born, 1952, The Average Life Expectancy Of An American Was 68. I Was Shocked By That Figure And Every Time I Mention It I Hear A Gasp From Somebody In The Crowd. Now, Of Course, We're More Or Less At 80, So That Means That We've Gotten 12 Additional Years.

The Gender Gap Looks At This Point Like It's Going To Favor The President, Particularly Among White Suburban Women. I Certainly Think It's Going To Be An Issue. But I Think The Single Most Important Thing In This Election Will Be Turnout.

The More Humdrum Aspects Of Life Do Not Make For Gripping Reading. To Render Them Compelling, A Writer Must Describe The Universal In Eloquent And Evocative Prose. Alas, Frey's Writing Suggests That This Was Not An Option, And He Came Up With Something Else.

Familiarity Breeds Content.

Reporters Are Not Paid To Operate In Retrospect. Because When News Begins To Solidify Into Current Events And Finally Harden Intohistory, It Is The Stories We Didn't Write, The Questions We Didn't Ask That Prove Far, Far More Damaging Than The Ones We Did.

Trying To Be Perfect May Be Inevitable For People Who Are Smart And Ambitious And Interested In The World And Its Good Opinion...what Is Really Hard, And Really Amazing, Is Giving Up On Being Perfect And Beginning The Work Of Becoming Yourself.

Some Of The Most Important Lessons I've Learned Have Been From Stumbling, And I Am Deeply Grateful That My Parents Allowed Me To Fight My Own Battles.

On The Other Hand, I Think That Governor Romney Has To Worry That His Turnout Is Going To Be Low, That He Is Not Going To Bring Out The Evangelicals, That He Is Not Going To Bring Out The Tea Party Stalwarts. If He Does Not, Then It's Pretty Clear That He Will Lose The Election. So I Think Turnout In Key Groups Is Going To Be Really, Really Key On Election Day.

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 To Ever Write Another Novel. Except That Each Writer Brings To The Table, If She Will Let Herself, Something That No One Else In The History Of Time Has Ever Had.

Inspirational Life

The Dark Aftermath Of The Frontier, Of The Vast Promise Of Possibility This Country First Offered, Is An Inflated Sense Of American Entitlement Today. We Want What We Want, And We Want It Now. Easy Credit. Fast Food. A Straight Shot Down The Interstate From Point A To Point B. The Endless Highway Is Crowded With The Kinds Of Cars Large Enough To Take A Mountain Pass In High Snow. Instead They Are Used To Take Children From Soccer Practice To Pizza Hut. In The Process They Burn Fuel Like There's No Tomorrow. Tomorrow's Coming.

I Once Wanted To Be A Personage. Now I Am Comfortable Being A Person.

I Do A Lot Of Mental Work Before I Ever Start Writing.

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.

Ignorance Is Death. A Closed Mind Is A Catafalque.

Look At The View And You'll Never Be Disappointed.

London Opens To You Like A Novel Itself. [...] It Is Divided Into Chapters, The Chapters Into Scenes, The Scenes Into Sentences; It Opens To You Like A Series Of Rooms, Door, Passsage, Door. Mayfair To Piccadilly To Soho To The Strand.

I Think The Last Couple Of Years Of Life For Many, Many People Are The Same As They Were 50, 60, 70 Years Ago. They Could Be Really Tough Because Of Infirmity.

Raising A Child Is A Little Like Picasso's Work; In The Beginning He Did Very Conventional Representational Things. Cubism Came After He Had The Rules Down Pat.

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.

The Purse Is The Mirror Of The Soul.

There's A Certain Kind Of Conversation You Have From Time To Time At Parties In New York About A New Book. The Word "banal" Sometimes Rears Its By-now Banal Head; You Say "underedited," I Say "derivative." The Conversation Goes Around And Around Various Literary Criticisms, And By The Time It Moves On One Thing Is Clear: No One Read The Book; We Just Read The Reviews.

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.

The Difference Between Government And Leadership Is That Leadership Has A Soul.

People Who Are Knowledgeable About Poetry Sometimes Discuss It In That Knowing, Rather Hateful Way In Which Oenophiles Talk About Wine: Robust, Delicate, Muscular. This Has Nothing To Do With How Most Of Us Experience It, The Heart Coming Around The Corner And Unexpectedly Running Into The Mind. Of All The Words That Have Stuck To The Ribs Of My Soul, Poetry Has Been The Most Filling.

Reading Is Another Thing That Has Made Me More Human By Exposing Me To Worlds I Might Never Have Entered And People I Might Never Meet.

It's Important To Remember That Feminism Is No Longer A Group Of Organizations Or Leaders. It's The Expectations That Parents Have For Their Daughters, And Their Sons, Too. It's The Way We Talk About And Treat One Another. It's Who Makes The Money And Who Makes The Compromises And Who Makes Dinner. It's A State Of Mind. It's The Way We Live Now.

I Learned To Love The Journey, Not The Destination. I Learned That This Is Not A Dress Rehearsal, And That Today Is The Only Guarantee You Get.

When You Really Want To Say No, Say No. You Can't Do Everything - Or At Least Not Well.

New York Is A City Where It's Particularly Hard To Be Poor, Not Only Because Everything Costs Twice As Much As It Does Elsewhere But Because Over-the-top Affluence Is Part Of Its Identity.

Sometimes We Don't See Out Of Our Peripheral Vision What's Coming Right Around The Corner.

There's No Greater Happiness Than Doing Something Every Day That You Love, That You Feel You Do In A Satisfactory Fashion, And Which Both Supports And Gives You Time To Support Your Family. I Felt So Lucky To Have All That.

Novels Are Usually Built On Conflict, Sometimes Very, Very Difficult Conflict. It's Why Men Write War Novels - Because There You Go, There's The Conflict Writ Large.

The Problem With Freedom Is That You Just Can't Go Back. Once People See What It Means To Be Free People, You Can't Go Back. So They're Going To Keep Nattering On About This And That, And Maybe They'll Make Another Stab At De-funding The Fabulous Planned Parenthood Or Something Of The Sort. To My Mind, It's Just Not Going To Work.

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 Place That Educates, Amuses, And Enthralls Us? It Is A Miracle. We Read In Bed Because Reading Is Halfway Between Life And Dreaming, Our Own Consciousness In Someone Else's Mind.

Behind Every Door In London There Are Stories, Behind Every One Ghosts. The Greatest Writers In The History Of The Written Word Have Given Them Substance, Given Them Life. And So We Readers Walk, And Dream, And Imagine, In The City Where Imagination Found Its Great Home.

God Bless The Physician Who Warms The Speculum Or Holds Your Hand And Looks Into Your Eyes. Perhaps One Subtext Of The Health Caredebate Is A Yen To Be Treated Like A Whole Person, Not Just An Eye, An Ear, A Nose Or A Throat. A Yen To Be Human Again, On The Part Of Patient And Doctor Alike.

You Cannot Be Really First-rate At Your Work If Your Work Is All You Are.

If We Really Feel Like We're Comfortable In Our Own Skins Now, We Have A Longer Period Of Time To Live Out That Kind Of Third Or Fourth Act Of Our Life.

If Men Got Pregnant, There Would Be Safe, Reliable Methods Of Birth Control. They'd Be Cheap, Too.

Writing For Urbanmoms Has Awarded Me A Multitude Of Amazing Opportunities. I Have Traveled To New Places; Alone And With My Family. I Have Discovered New Products, New Books, New Trends And New Restaurants, And Been Able To Share Them With My Readers. I've Met Other Wonderful Writers And Many Incredible Celebrities.

When I Quit The New York Times To Be A Fulltime Mother, The Voices Of The World Said I Was Nuts....but If Success Is Not On Your Own Terms, If It Looks Good To The World But Does Not Feel Good In Your Soul, It Is Not Success At All.

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Johann Sebastian Bach

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