“Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead “Pity us, yes, but we are brave, and wild, more life in us than we can bear, the fire infolding itself on us.”—Marilynne Robinson, Lila “The language...
It also seems honorable that another woman would value motherhood over all my priorities. But I do not believe that I am selfish and she is not. There are women who chose motherhood for selfish reasons. There are mothers who act selfishly even if they...
I knew I wanted to live in Telluride and marry Joe at exactly the same moment. We had been bathing in a stream in town park just after a long run on part of the Hardrock course that goes right through town. This was back...
Tonight, I took my children over to my grandmother’s place to say goodnight, as I do every night when I am home visiting my parents in Richmond. She lives with them, so it is a short trip and one they really look forward to each...
If you live in Silicon Valley, or just on planet Earth, and you are surprised by the story that broke out of Google in the last few weeks, wherein an insane number of executives were found to have sexually harassed and violated female employees, the...
“It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I...
I am writing this while listening to Aretha in a tiny hotel room in Manhattan, a place that I will always associate with the Queen of Soul, both because her music seemed so much a part of the fabric of this city she loved and...
“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and...
In a recent interview on the fabulous new podcast Bare Naked Truth with my friend Abby Slate, she and I dished a bit about what makes me a “bad yogi” and what I find so troubling about yoga these days. I’d like to elaborate on...
“Not every fateful moral choice, every judgment of good and bad or right and wrong, is a matter for public debate…[T]he issues in moral perfectionism are not crises of conscience of this kind…they are deciding on what kinds of lives they wish to live and...