Dear ones, In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Toni Morrison said this. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Sometimes I’m so divorced from the meaning of my own swirling emotions that I […]

Dear ones, So many of my inventures are about the endless quest to get on top of things in my life. Or, if not on top of them, at least not pinned to the floor by their weight. Y’know? I picture people who are good at life like this: they are gardeners of all their […]

Dear friends, I have a few “Oops, I did it again” patterns that play out repeatedly in my life. One of them is dreaming big, overcommitting, and finding myself greedily trying to squeeze two or three lives into the space of this one lifetime I’ve been given. Luckily, I’m starting to learn to read my […]

Dear friends, When I was about 11, my mum woke me up one morning with a plan. We were going to catch a train up the center of the Australian continent, then sail to Indonesia and spend a few months island hopping. Nothing was going to stop us: not the fact that we didn’t have […]

Dear friends, My best and latest rejection for my novel landed in my inbox this morning. No matter how reconciled and chill I tell myself I am, a rejection always feels like being kicked in the chest by something large and well-trained in the art of kicking. I sat down with my beloveds and we […]

Last week I had a list-related freakout. I wailed and moaned and lamented. It was something to see, friends. “It’s too muuuuuuch,” I wailed. “I caaaaaan’t,” I moaned. Martha, being a sympathetic sort, said, “You must have a really long list.” “But that’s the thing,” I lamented. It’s not the length of the list. It’s the breadth of it.” […]