Lisa Guest

I've been told I over-analyze things too much. I've been told I'm too sensitive about little things. I've been told I should grow a thicker skin. I like my skin thin. It feels the delicious feelings of touch, of care, of erotic delight. Why should I harden against a world...

As the first edit of my Courting Me(n) book is nearly complete, I've had only a few issues with my brilliant editor. There is a piece on farting, a delicious man and my mother that she hated. She edited it out. I asked why. She had definite reasons why she...

In 1991, a friend introduced me to Anaïs Nin's second husband. Rupert Pole employed me for five years to work with Nin's manuscripts for A Journal of Love. The friend who made the introduction was also a writer. He told me then when I was just 31, "Don't...

You'll remember last time we talked I said I have cancer, and it's in remission. I'm finishing my book and so many different feelings and emotions are flooding my center. On Easter-Passover I was particularly vexed. I wasn't having a panic attack, but it sure felt like I was creeping...

Isn't there a saying that if one waits long enough, good things come to pass? When the timing is right, things fall into place? Or of course that real cute one, when the student is ready the teacher appears.

There is a kind of living that is dead. The days...

This morning as I lay in bed, anxious about getting up to face the day ahead of me I snarled with how easy it must be for others to be happy and satisfied about life.

Yesterday I took the red bus to get downtown to the convention center for the...

Last night I was on the phone with a friend around 11 when she told me about the 8.9 earthquake in Japan. "There are tsunami warnings for the West Coast. You better get out of there and head inland." She couldn't find any further information, so I got out of...

There is no other activity that encompasses all aspects of living, of effort, of being, as much as this morning's activity. In the space of two hours, I was not only hovering at the break between the top of the sky and the bottom of outer space, but I then...

When I was a kid I liked sparklers. I knew they could burn or sting if you didn't swirl them fast enough, but they were pretty, exciting, and in my own hands. After seeing the big extravaganzas in the sky to have something my size that I could control was...

The truth, or my truth? What's perspective? What's fact?

I try to slow my life down enough to truly appreciate the flow of it, the juice when available, the pain when delivered, the moments of recognition. I found these quotes about truth and reflected on them for close to an...

There was an article in the New York Times yesterday entitled "What Broke My Father's Heart." It was written very personally and yet very professionally at the same time by Katy Butler.

This daughter explains, "At a point hard to precisely define, they (her parents) stopped being beneficiaries...

I remember before Sex and The City ever came out on HBO. I read about it in the trades, had ordered Candace Bushnell's book and was reading the stories before I ever met the cast of four that would live a lifetime off of enacting her characters.

I...

Recently in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd wrote an article entitled http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/opinion/19dowd.html"All the Single Ladies." In it she wrote, "Single carries a connotation of eligibility and possibility, while unmarried has that dreaded over-the-hill, out-of-luck, you-are-finished, no-chance implication. An aroma of mothballs and perpetual aunt."

I read...

In the beginning of 2009, I corresponded with a male poet who had found my writing "liberating, revolutionary and one-of-a-kind." He said my power of language was "amazing, breath-taking and powerful." These descriptions not only pump up my ego, they make the blank white page less intimidating. I value them...

How seriously do we answer this question? How deeply do we probe into the issue of trust? Do we say we love in the moment and forever be committed into all the ancillary promises that are attached, whether or not they are aligned with our highest good? Or do we...

I got good news today at the City of Hope. No part of me went in there this morning thinking that the news was going to be good.

What have I learned beyond how blessed I am?

1) If worrying served a purpose, time would be better spent worrying.

Received a card this week that said, "In the great swimming pool of life, there's always going to be a little pee."

I'm one of the lucky ones. I have a cancer that is supposedly slow growing. I went through three weeks of terror and was given a reprieve. Yet,...

Even though my head is pounding, I've talked to way too many people today, written and read way too many emails today; I have neither exercised nor have I eaten greens and I have no patience or inspiration to write 500 words. But I must write 500 words before I...

I just had my PET SCAN. Put down a $20 payment on a $4,183 fee. For this pricey experience I had to fast for six hours, not swallow sugar, caffeine, carbohydrates, alcohol or even chew gum for about fifteen hours. I arrive without any hint of discomfort to come, no...

Trying to learn the lesson, trying to forget, trying to know the difference between real anxiety and induced discomfort. Terror in one's heart can arise when faced with one's greatest fear.

Tonight, quite by accident, I was in the middle of a movie in which the main character, whose name...