I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11.

Capo, my first golden retriever, so loved to swim she once jumped off a cliff to get into Lake Superior.

I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time.

When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.

The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures.

My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.