Writing

The question I often ponder is: are people fundamentally good or fundamentally bad? My answer to that depends on the day. And whether or not I’m behind the wheel of a car. It is easy to [...]

Many white men are in trouble. Wages for them have been flat for decades. They see challenges to their supremacy from women, from minorities. Gone are the days when there were enough good blue [...]

Every year, I write down what I want to achieve in the coming year and store it in the Notes on my phone. I read somewhere that it’s best to state resolutions as if they’d already [...]

This is my solstice post from 2014. It bears re-posting on this winter solstice as well: Today is the shortest day of the year.  It’s appropriately gray outside.  The light is dim and [...]

I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but when it comes to doing things, I don’t have a great sense of what’s “boy” stuff and what’s “girl” stuff. [...]

The phone rang this morning at 8:05 a.m.. It was a call timed as only someone who knows when I drop off my children at school can time it, because he sometimes shares the chore. “Good [...]

It was 2008. I had just taken a deep breath and told my story of being undocumented for the first time, in a piece published in Newsweek. I braced for the response, fearful of the backlash. What [...]

I have a thing for goats. I could regale you with why, but then you might think I’m weird. Okay, I’ll regale you with why. First, my now-ex-parents-in-law had a goat farm. I used to [...]

Some of my favorite memories of my childhood are of standing in front of the beautiful lions in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library (named Patience and Fortitude, I came to [...]

Shortly after I moved out at 18 years old, I signed up for one of those old-fashioned book clubs which shipped you out a book a month unless you told them not to. (I had overestimated the [...]

One of the questions I get asked most often during my book events is, “How do you deal with writer’s block?” My answer usually is, “There’s no such thing.” What I don’t usually add is: that’s not [...]

I am fascinated by aberrant human behavior. Give me a documentary about the childhood of a serial killer or a totalitarian ruler, and I’m hooked. What makes people do things most of us [...]

I hadn’t even heard of “Giving Tuesday” last week when I decided it was time to find a new volunteering opportunity. (Giving Tuesday is today, FYI). For me, it just felt like [...]

Why do Iowa and New Hampshire get to have their primaries first? What stops, say, New Jersey, from deciding it’s going to move its primary up, thus making itself more politically relevant? [...]

This is a review of the movie, not the book. Alas, I have yet to read the book. Written by Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, I need to check it out, but haven’t. But the movie, peeps! [...]

Writing about my Feng Shui journey yesterday made me think of my spiritual practices today. As explained yesterday, it is a bit of a mishmosh of all the things I have found comfort in – [...]

One of the main questions I get from teens is “How do you become a writer?” (To which I say, first and foremost, yay, writers!). My short answer, which I don’t at all mean to be [...]

I always say that Feng Shui was my “gateway drug” to spirituality. Raised Catholic but never able to connect to the traditional dogma, I decided when I was fifteen years old that I [...]

Recently I learned that someone I care about is having trouble with their teenage child. It’s trouble of the major variety, requiring professional intervention. My heart aches for them. [...]

I’m drowning. The water comes up fast, and I know I can’t hold on. Drowning. Then… I can only describe him as an apparition – an angel – a man I’d never seen before and would never see again [...]

I am slightly suspicious of the efficient. As a classically-trained virtuoso of a procrastinator, people who get things done on time just creep me out a bit. Just what are they up to? [...]

It’s not exactly that I want civilization to end or anything like that. It’s more that I have a strange fascination with the idea. While other summer readers are picking up a romance or a good [...]

In the last week or so I have written about my pessimism with the direction the rhetoric has taken in this (still far-off) presidential election. Specifically, when Donald Trump said that he [...]

The other day I got a letter from a reader that said, “I loved your book. But I wish the boyfriend would have stayed longer!” I tend to agree with her. The boyfriend in THE SECRET [...]

Yesterday, I heard Chris Cuomo on CNN refer to himself as “second generation American.” Son of the former (now late) governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, and grandson to Italian [...]

New obsession alert: this weekend I chomped through the entire first season of The Man in the High Castle, an Amazon original production. (An aside: I love that Netflix and now Amazon are [...]

I love getting emails from readers! I try to be good about replying to all of them, although sometimes it takes me a while. This email, from a student who wants to be a writer and is doing a [...]

Thanks so much to School Library Journal for highlighting THE SECRET SIDE OF EMPTY in their “Libro por libro” section. The article is called “Long-Awaited: YA and memoirs for [...]

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Matthew 25:35 I was appalled but not surprised when one governor [...]

Thank you so much to the wonderful staff at Nutley Library and the Clifton Commons Barnes and Noble for a great day of bookish fun! I was delighted to speak to the great group there, especially [...]