To taste fully is to live fully.

Each pineapple plant produces only one fruit per year. It can take up to two years for the pineapple to ripen, and it's important to wait, because once it's picked, it can't ripen any further. The unripe pineapple is not only horrible tasting but poisonous.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn’t pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I’ve based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado’s aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.

As an adult I generally feel this pressure to be thin, not from men, but from other women. As a silent or not-so-silent competition, a constant monitoring of who’s thinner, comments about it – either compliments or veiled insults doesn’t matter – it always drives me nuts.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other’s company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

I wanted to capture time through how food and I were getting along at any given moment. That necessitated writing some dark stuff, some sad stuff, and a lot of painful memories, because my life has often been dark, sad, and painful. I didn’t want to sugarcoat anything.

I’ve always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

Blogging is different from both journal-writing and writing for print. It’s more fun than either of those. The freedom to write whatever I want and the unmediated connection with readers are the payoff.

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my “real” writing.