The world lost one of its brightest, fiercest, most intelligent and compassionate souls this week when Grace Paley died at the age of 84. I had heard that Grace was ill, but it seemed impossible to me that she would die. She was just too damned tenacious to die. Too...

In an hour a car is coming to pick me up and take me into the city, where I am taping a radio show -- part of the slow and steady trickle of book publicity that I continue to do two months after Black & White's publication. And this...

Earlier this year, I found myself at dinner with a bunch of women I didn't know well. They were, for the most part, older than I, and mothers of high school and college kids. They were also a very particular subset: wealthy, privileged, living in Manhattan. The conversation swirled around...