“The cancer hit like a bolt out of the blue, discovered by a disbelieving radiologist in a routine mammogram. I met for the first time with my new oncologist to discuss treatment options on my fifty-third birthday. I found myself making a personal commitment to combat any internal voices that wished me dead. I’d worked for years on my harsh inner critic. Now I found myself visualizing my inner attacker as a bully coming up a set of school steps to beat me up. I vowed to kick him back down the stairs each time he came after me. I was sobered to discover that I was having to kick him down thousands of times a day, but what was ultimately born of those repetitive efforts were the first glimmers of a more deeply rooted self-love.”

“…you might simply be curious, though in folklore and mythology curiosity is rarely depicted as a simple affair, but one that spurs both danger and development. While curiosity may literally kill the cat, avid curiosity tends to accompany intellectual giftedness in children. Freud had it that the child’s first curiosity concerns what takes place in the secrecy of the marital bed, much like our Judeo-Christian myth of Eve’s curiosity, whose first fruit is the dawning awareness of sexuality and nakedness and brings death into the world. The link between secrecy and curiosity, sex and wisdom, love and death is the through line, not just for gossip and Woody Allen films, but for the whole of human experience, giving it its piquancy and punch.”

“…geneticists tell us that we all descend matrilineally from an African woman they dub the Mitochondrial Eve. Can we even begin to imagine how much beauty, how much suffering, how many dreams deferred in the face of implacable reality were undergone by that Eve and all those who came after her? And how much we ourselves matter in the continued stream of life—our charge to create, through our own willingness to suffer and to dream, an ongoing future that will honor and redeem our ancestors?”

“Some ancient nut-brown Turkish ancestress accompanied me as I burst forth from the womb of my pale-skinned mother, casting me into an otherness from my personal family and the small community of Hermosa Beach where I spent my first years. Living by the sea meant playing on the sand, and in the summers my skin would tan to a rich umber—which might have been fine, had Hermosa Beach not then been primarily populated by Dust Bowl refugees…Bible-thumping Baptists (with) blue-eyed, tow-headed, alabaster-skinned children…”