Mama always said a good family has one heartbeat. No one knows you like the people you live with, and no one will take up your cause to the outside world quite like your blood relatives.
Let life unfold, say what you mean. You can’t always think about what you’ve lost, or what you don’t have, or what you didn’t get. Because when you do that, you’re missing out on the now. You can’t know if you’ll be here tomorrow or a year from now.
Maybe a first love exists to reaffirm the best parts of yourself, the choices you made when you didn't worry about the consequences. Maybe a first love exists to remind you to be brave in the moment, to stand up for your feelings, instead of shrinking back in the face of potential loneliness.
And so, when I was a young writer I always worked hard on imagery, and I knew that the roots of imagery were the senses - and that if my readers could feel, taste and see what I was talking about, I would be able to tell them a story.
If you look around to find meaning in everything that happens, you will end up disappointed. Sometimes there aren’t reasons behind the terrible things that go on. I ask myself, If I knew all the answers, would it help? I lie awake and wonder why I don’t have parents and wonder what will become of my brother and me. But when the morning comes, I realize that there’s nothing to be done about what has already happened. I can only get up and do my chores and push through the day and find the good in it.
And when you clear away the cobwebs of the description of every job in the world, at the bottom of that job is service. It's service. And I took that ethic and applied it to my writing craft.
For a woman, love is the highest dream, and if a man promises to build a ladder tall enough to reach it, she believes him, hikes up her skirt, and follows him to the stars.
I have held the following jobs: office temp, ticket seller in movie theatre, cook in restaurant, nanny, and phone installer at the Super Bowl in New Orleans.