The first person who ever told me that happiness was work was this manic-depressive artist I knew when I was in my 20s. I was like, 'What are you talking about? Happiness just happens. That's even the root of that word. How could it be work?'

Looking out over that poisoned water, it seemed like such a scam of anti-earth abuser culture to teach people that they cause their own cancer with negative thinking. Maybe this desert lake had been guilty of negative thinking?

Shame can look a lot like rude.

Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn’t actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.

I wondered at all the ways abuse invents us.

Settling other people’s land is an American tradition.

Conventional wisdom tells us we’ll only be happier after a divorce if the marriage itself was a war zone.

I didn’t know if the cure for my life was to lie to everyone about everything or to become brutally honest.

With each beat, the heart pumps nearly three ounces of blood into the arteries – seventy-five to ninety gallons an hour when the body is at rest.

I’m sure there were plenty of loving, attentive mothers in the ‘me generation,’ but none of them lived at my house.