Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture's primary mode of communication, a ra….

Love—the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete—is ….

Alcoholism is the disease of more..

There's something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia that disabuses yo….

Me, I walk along and feel quietly defensive, a recluse in the Land of We. That's quite the loaded word, 'we..

Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got th….

The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind..

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many..

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go..

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way..

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop wai….

Consumerism thrives on emotional voids..

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way o….

Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alco….

Cats are narcissistic. Their needs come before ours. They don't understand the word "No." They carry themselves with that aloof, arrogant sense of pe….

When you're starving or wrapped up in a cycle of binge-ing-and-purging, or sexually obsessed with (someone), it is very hard to think about anything ….

You'll reach into your wallet to brandish a photograph of a new puppy, and a friend will say, 'Oh, no - not pictures..

Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness….

What is this drive to be thinner, prettier, better dressed, other? Who exactly is this other and what does she look like beyond the jacket she's wear….

Before you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and s….

Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts..