Ironically, there’s something democratic in our common situation, the way in which we’re all feeling the same fear, the same uncertainty, the same panic, worry, anger, and anxiety. A solidarity, finally.

Narrative can preserve and remake the world as it falls apart. Such is the point of telling any story. Illness reminds us that the world isn’t ours; literature let’s us know that it is—sometimes.

Prayer and poetry are defined by being words that gesture beyond words themselves.

That most people know that Trump is lying—and that he still gets away with it—counterintuitively shows how masterful said lying is.

I choose books with the resigned sense that I will never in my lifetime read all the authors recommended to me. It’s strange to have that feeling with TV.

Prayer is a narrative into which one must descend; if it is a poem, it is one where the words themselves become indistinguishable from the reader.

We certainly both admire Orwell, but the writer we keep circling back to is The Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins.

Regency women didn’t wear underpants.

We are fickle—impossible to please, hungry for work that will stimulate and nourish our intellect just so. Enter the dramatic TV series.

Her analysis, she seems to feel, must be couched in womanly terms. I know I am a woman, but I can know things. Look at me knowing them, showing them to you.

When Shylock gives his celebrated soliloquy—“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”—the previous owner approvingly added in the margins “Bring your own BOOYEA!”

They tell a story, perhaps tell it well. But I finish the book and close it with no sense of what the book thinks about the story it told.

But reading a book a week made it harder to justify abandonment. I didn’t want to fall behind. The thought of that sent my Type A brain into a tailspin.

A “savvy woman,” the book purported, understood that there was “power in women’s bodies.” Was I a “savvy woman”? I shut the book, terrified that for some reason, I wasn’t.

Because being a musician—a decade of noes and passes—wasn’t enough, I’ve decided to have another go at failure in an attempt to start a writing career.

What a strange, terrible, beautiful thing this life is, that if we were to fully inhabit every single blessed second of it, we’d be as eternal as it were ever possible to be.

My daughter would need a chair to reach them, and I could see it was this fact—not my endorsement of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classics—that sold her on them.