A couple weeks ago, I reunited with my fourth grade best friend, Elana, who was visiting from Florida. (Facebook is AMAZING!)


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Among the countless reasons why it’s good to be friends with Lauren Oliver: she a good listener and a good advice-giver; she’s incredibly supportive but always honest; she gives great (and extensive) editorial notes on works-in-progress; she’s an amazing cook; and once a year she says, “Hi guys, let’s have a writing retreat” - and then she makes it ( Read more... )

I started this blog a few days before my 29th birthday, when I was just on the verge of feeling like a real author, and so excited about the publication of my first book - at that point, still two years away.

You know when you have a vision for what your life will be like? I was totally in it back then, what my future life as an author would be. ( Read more... )

I’ve been thinking up ways to update this space more frequently, without being too boring about it. Since my friends are the least boring people I know in the world, and since a bunch of them are brilliant writers, I decided one thing to do is every week or so, post a little bit about one of their books and include a quote I loved from such book.

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I’ve been pretty good about updating the blog of late - and this is something about which I feel a disproportionate sense of pride.  But now it’s been since last Wednesday since I wrote a post (I’m not counting the automatic Twitter posts) and the pressure is on to keep the good blogger streak going.

The problem is that tonight, for whatever ( Read more... )

Right around this time last year, I made a list of things for which I was thankful and posted it on this very blog.  Then I headed out to meet my stepsister Laura, her husband Rob, and their three fabulous kids for a post-Thanksgiving brunch. I remember walking through Central Park to the Westside that day.  The weather was positively glorious and ( Read more... )

I’ve met a good number of my closest friends because I knew one person, kind of like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.  Except for me, instead of Kevin Bacon, it’s Elizabeth Glaser, the co-founder of the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.  In December it’ll be sixteen years since Elizabeth died, and I’m still meeting people through her.

A little over a year ago, ( Read more... )

It seems like the life of a whole other person but it wasn’t too long ago that I was a law firm associate.  One day I was put on a document review.  (That means exactly what it sounds like:  there are a bunch of documents and you review them for certain words or phrases.)  It was Labor Day Weekend, and if I’m being completely honest, I wasn’t ( Read more... )

I haven’t yet read the book I want to blog about.  It’s called Let’s Take the Long Way Home.  I just heard about it today.  Someone posted about it on Facebook, how it was the best memoir she’d read in a long, long time.  I googled the title and read the description on Amazon.  Then, crying a little bit (I’m kind of known for the fact that I always ( Read more... )

1.  For those interested in how dinner at Arielle’s turned out -- and that’s probably a very limited number of you:  mini pizzas were delicious and fully consumed.  Pasta with meat sauce was good, except for the lack of shaky cheese.  (That won’t happen again.)  And the peanut butter bars were a big hit.   Arielle informed me after I’d made ( Read more... )