That is the question I put to Anna Quindlen and Anna Sale on this week’s podcast. We ended up in conversation about money, mindshare and control in the context of marriage. Anna Sale was particularly forthcoming about how they run the numbers in her house which led to her husband saying that he never worried she would cheat on him but he did wonder if she had secret bank accounts. I myself struggle in just this same way.

Here’s a few other things on my running list of that which I cannot yet master:

1 — remembering not to fall…

I got going down a rabbit hole recently — the original search was grudges, referring to a little problem I have with a certain someone (who we can call C.S.). I’m not proud of this trying relationship but if you and I were one-on-one with cocktails in hand, I could convince you that I was right, I have always been right and I will always be right. But that’s one of the tricks of grudge holding: one can always find someone to serve up some idiot compassion, that well meaning automatic taking-of-sides that friends do for friends. It’s a way…

I did it again. I did the thing that people do, that I do, that I tell my kids not to do. I oversimplified. I said something that suggested what has been true for me and my parents must also be true for others, and by others, I mean all others.

I was talking to a couple other writers about family life on the podcast and we got going about those tricky (sometimes devastating) moments that pass between adult children and aging parents. Should you maybe stop driving? Move? Update your will?

Each of these mortality-related negotiations, whether that’s what…

I have been reflecting on identity (the question seems to come up one way or another every day, whether it’s Meghan Markle or David Brooks). I find myself going back to a conversation among a small group of new friends that has stuck with me over the years.

A man in his 50's sitting next to his wife, for whom his love was evident, told me with a hitch in his voice that the hardest thing he’s had to accept was that although he excelled in music and had tried hard to make a life as a professional musician, and…

There’s a Liz Phair song I’ve loved since, well way back before I became a mother, when I went to concerts on weeknights, pressed into crowds, often watching a tiny woman play brainy, clever, sexy songs. My favorite is called Perfect World. For me, it’s always been about a specific ambition I suspect lurks within all of us to be special, and enough. The refrain repeats the admission: I want to be cool, tall, vulnerable and luscious. I would have it all if I only had that much.

We were hiking The Dipsea, a famous eight-mile trail in California’s Marin County that starts with nearly 700 steps. My 17-year-old, a casual athlete who might amuse herself with a swim, a run, and a speed bag session all in the same long pandemic day, was forever just up around the next corner. Finally, the lunch break I’d been waiting for was upon us and we sat down side by side looking at the Pacific Ocean. After a few deep breaths, Claire passed me my egg sandwich and said, “So I was thinking on the trail about what I need…

Let me start by saying that talking one-on-one to Melinda Gates for a good hour about her takeaways after 2+ decades of research, travel, observation, collaboration, maddening failures and massive successes was what my dad would call a Lifetime High. She is in this work deep. Changing the world is her whole life. And she is determined to do it smart.

She has refined a point of view that helps her decide what is and is not worth doing. She also has a carefully developed approach to whatever piece of the puzzle she is trying to place into the whole…

I have been painting like crazy since the lead blanket of the pandemic made the days dark and the living heavy. Pools, tennis courts, bathtubs. Cake, beach chairs, kayakers. I set up a table on sawhorses in the garage and put on some Nathaniel Rateliff and sometimes crack into a hard kombucha. Within minutes, my hands are covered in color — which means I cannot touch my phone or laptop.

I am not super great at painting (good work requires a kind of patience I find elusive) and no one but my mother would want my stuff in her house…