Deborah Gaines

I've been following the travails of the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf. For those whose minds have been elsewhere, D&L is teetering toward what promises to be the largest law firm bankruptcy on record. The firm and its former chairman, Steve Davis, are also said to be the...

I over-filled the boiler the other day, causing water to burst out of the release valve and flood the entire basement. It's going to cost a thousand bucks to clean everything out and replace the carpeting with something more idiot-proof, like tile.

For the first few days after it...

I've been married and divorced three times, which makes me one of those people the Wall Street Journal describes, delicately, as having "a complex marital biography." For most of my life, this has been a source of shame. But lately I've begun wondering if I'm really the...

I spent the past two weeks chanting slogans like "Republicans, out of my vagina!" So maybe I'm feeling a tiny bit sensitive about unsolicited opinions on what I do with my body.

With this in mind, allow me to say that it's none of your goddamned business if I dye...

There's something hilarious about the phrase "blended family." As though you can throw two sets of hostile people in the blender and serve them poolside with fruit kebabs and little paper umbrellas.

I'm something of a maven on this subject, having had two stepfathers, two stepmothers, three step siblings, and...

Dear young person,

When I was your age, I made a raft of decisions that older folks (and even some of my peers) thought were monumentally stupid. Here are just a few:

1. At 22, I married my college boyfriend.
2. At 24, I dropped out of graduate...

We've fed them, sheltered them, taught them to live independently. Then suddenly (if we're lucky) our kids are gone. Daily contact is replaced by occasional text messages and visits on major holidays. While we struggle to keep abreast of events in their lives, they rarely do the same for us....

A woman I know -- let's call her Joan -- recently took a leave of absence from work in order to focus on her son's college search. "His choice of school will determine the outcome for at least the first part of his adult life," she explains. "I want him...

When people ask if I plan to marry again, I see an image of a broken-down boxer -- blood from the cut above his eye mixing with the sweat streaming down his face -- with a microphone shoved under his nose. "So will you go back in the ring?" the...

I have made my New Year's resolution. It is to grow lighter: to put down, give away, or otherwise lose unnecessary weight.

My plan was to start small--say, cleaning out a closet or refusing a second slice of pizza. Instead, I crash-landed in the middle of a sack of...

My family has never had a Christmas tree, hung holiday lights or served eggnog. We're Jewish, although we only go to temple three times a year.

Even Hanukkah, in the consumer sense, was a stretch for my Hungarian ex-husband. "In the...

My friend Eric recently told me about the stream of women--average age 55--who have been sharing his bed since his divorce. "I've never had so many one-night stands in my life," he said wonderingly.

For someone who came of age in the seventies, that's a big statement. I've been...

It's taken me 51 years to achieve a level of anonymity so total, my kids think I'm the most boring person on earth. If you were to see me shopping at the grocery store, a chunky vision in yoga pants and a dog-hair-flecked black sweater, you wouldn't spare me a...