I don’t want a big life, but I don’t want a small life either. I want a calm, happy, fulfilled life, which is one I doubt I’ll ever have. Can you believe itwhen I tell you Iwant my parent’s life?That I want their quiet, steadfast love,their iron belief in each other? I spent so manyyears trying torun from them telling myself thisis the worstthat can happen...

You can tell I’m nervous when I don’t shut up, when I turn into a chatterbox that will do or say anything to avoid having to do or say what has to be done or said. I am not brave. I am not fearless. I am not even casual, ever, it’s always all or nothing for...

When you were younger you read that Robert Frost poem like everyone else in school and spent years dreaming of that point in your life where two paths finally diverge. All those years you spent trudging down that pin-straight road, fretful for the future, trying not to detour into the thick woods like the thickheaded people...

It’s been twenty-five years since you’ve stood with your friends singing Hallelujah on a stage, feeling the vibration of a hundred voices lifting from the platform to the sky. It’s been twenty years since you listened to that same song on the way to your friend’s funeral. He’d shot himself to death at work. What a life. Now...

it wasn’t the argument that ended things for you,the one you held on to and wrote about, the oneyou felt was so demeaning and mean — it was a simple question — and you wanted to give a simple, honest answer that’s itthat’s all you didn’t know what would happenyou didn’t even know what you wantedto happen, but...