Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All autobiography is fiction.
I will never do Pilates. I walk.
I admit to a bias toward high culture.
I am a longtime, rabid fan of Jonathan Kozol.
Los Angeles is the nation's cultural scapegoat.
Life at the top may be privileged, but it is not simple.
With more women in power, the world would be better off.
When faced with writer's block, lower your standards and keep going.
Our entire personality, our energy level, and how we cope is hormonal.
In our 20s, women in my generation, we all wanted to be Laurie Anderson.
I agree that mommy wars are not good for any mothers: that such wars are time and effort wasted.
living in Los Angeles was like being an extra in a movie that was starring other people entirely.
It is during fertility that a female loses herself and enters that cloud overly rich in estrogen.
Approaching 50, I am living a life that is less sunlit Waldman/Chabon than tattered Charles Bukowski.
Panic is efficient. Panic is effective. Panic is the way I get things done! Panic attacks are my booster rockets!
Menopause is your return to where you were before, when your hormone levels are the same as a pre-adolescent girl's.
I cohabited for 20 years with my longtime husband and father of my two now-teen daughters in a stable family household.
In my case, when it arrived at 49, perimenopause was terrifying and like nothing I had ever before physically experienced.
Very, very few adults possess so much charm that they can long be supported by another adult based on that attribute alone.
I am a member of the 'sandwich' generation, that group that must simultaneously care for elderly parents and support children.
We women make the lion's share of household purchases in this country. We ourselves drive billions of dollars a year in sales.
Whether you wish to chant 'Our houses, our selves' or 'We have houses, hear us roar,' for us women, home is where the heart is.
I'm pretty sure that changing diapers of all sizes isn't the kind of women's work Betty Friedan had in mind, nor Linda Hirshman.
The paradox is, I can't miss the good things about my father while he is alive, but I will of course miss him... when he is dead.
In 1900, the average life expectancy of a US citizen was 48, so most menopausal women were dead, which is not a great place to be.
I'm a journalist, so my friends are journalists: magazines, newspapers, even public radio. Nobody had their kids in public school.
In the end, the real wisdom of menopause may be in questioning how fun or even sane this chore wheel called modern life actually is.
When I think of Chinese parents, I think of people who weep upon hearing Beethoven, but who can't necessarily bring that joy to others.
While having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good.
In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.
Almost 50 years old now, some 30 years after graduation, I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world.
I think of the friends of mine who were blissfully single in their 20s and 30s. Still single in their 40s and 50s, they seem to be contracting a bit.
If I was going to pretend to be the supermom next door, it would've been counterfeit and a lie. I figured I had to write something out of a new place.
The bad news in our most cosmopolitan and vibrant cities is that many middle-class people can no longer afford to live in 'middle-class' school districts.
I am shamed to realize that in my marriage, my daughters never heard their father and me fight, which also meant, perhaps, that we didn't truly communicate.
The terror of the ordinary is what keeps many affluent, educated parents and their kids out of the merely 'decent' schools, the ones that are simply 'fine.'
Journalists are quite surprised outside their dinner parties when they hear where I live. 'Van Nuys? You still live there?' It is like saying you're from Alabama.
The problem is that, partly because we are women, a large measure of our happiness depends on our relationships - including, unavoidably, our relationships with men.
In the 'Mad Men' era, the archetypal dad came home; put down his briefcase; received pipe, Manhattan, roast beef, potatoes, key-lime pie; and was - apparently - content.
I don't know how it's going for my sisters, but as my 40s and Verizon bills and mortgage payments roll on, I seem to have an ever more recurring 1950s housewife fantasy.
Things need shaking up when American women feel endangered even as Yosemite bears lumber around belching, their eyes glazed with surfeit, their pelts covered in Oreo crumbs.
I'd be lying if I claimed that, in spite of our amiable afternoons, I don't have an ache somewhere in my heart that my children will not be playing Carnegie Hall anytime soon.
Many men today can cook, or at least order takeout, and know where and how to hire domestic help, perhaps with refreshing clarity and less anxiety than ever-conflicted mothers.
I am stricken with the peculiar curse of being a 21st-century woman who makes more than the man she's living with - first with a husband for 13 years and now with a new partner.
My sister is not my mother, but more than anyone else, she fills that role for me now - like it or not. And indeed, all women I know play that role for somebody - like it or not.
I really don't think our school system is an evil borg force. It's sort of like the government. It's not even efficient enough to be a borg of total evil, even if it wanted to be.
In Los Angeles, we've seen a phenomenon where a school will go from one that no one will go to, to within three years becoming the 'hot' school. I've seen this over and over again.
I find I'm the sort of harried working mother who has difficulty scheduling in a bit of rest amid the Ptolemaically complicated interlocking gears of professional and personal life.
In the end, we all want a wife. But the home has become increasingly invaded by the ethos of work, work, work, with twin sets of external clocks imposed on a household's natural rhythms.
Typically, middle-class educated parents' search for their children's schools takes on the feel, if not of teen girls trying on different outfits, of adolescents trying on various selves.