How could a person have and do all these stupid things--clip coupons and double lock the front door--and then one day just cease to exist?
These fucking women really piss me off,' April said. 'Because instead of being elated by the thought of making their own happiness and chasing some crazy dream, all they want to do is narrow their options and do something safe.
The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.
It wasn't right that you could only understand your parents' pain once you'd experienced the things they had, and by then they were gone.
I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera' when I was 19, and I still think about the characters.
A high percentage of each of my books has been written in Des Moines.
I like dressing up for dates and dissecting a dinner conversation with a new guy to determine if he might be The One.
There's a Dar Williams song about 'houses that are haunted, with the kids who lie awake and think about other generations past who used to use that dripping sink.' I was one of those kids.
I knew that my dollhouse was a toy, but in a way, it seemed more like a portal to adulthood. I didn't play with it the way I might with my Barbie dream house. Instead, I furnished it. I kept it pristine. I decorated the house for each season. I had jack-o'-lanterns in the fall and a Christmas tree with working lights in the winter.
I know a lot of women who embody what it means to be a feminist but do not want to use that word. The misperceptions about what it's all about have gotten into their heads.
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.
For my seventh birthday, my parents gave me a plain, unfinished wooden dollhouse. It had six empty rooms, two floors, a staircase, and a door that swung out onto a little front stoop. The windows opened, and the roof retracted on one side, revealing an attic.
