Michelle Herman

The first draft of my new book—my first for children—was written in 2001, as a gift for my daughter, who was then eight and a half years old.

True love, we say, about the romances that matter most to us. I fell in love. About true friendship — that tug, that falling in, falling together, snapping into place — no one says I fell.

If you do the best you can — if you really do — one way or another, things will work out. Maybe not in exactly the way you imagined, but they will.

Stop waiting and hoping for your wife or husband to change. They are who they are. That’s why you married them.

My great discovery, that cold spring in New England, was that not having someone to sing with didn’t matter so much, after all. Not if I had someone to sing to.

I know you’re worried about not being good enough at the things that matter most to you. Well, you’re not, yet. But you’ll get better.

Don’t bother emailing. Ever. You’ll never get a response to an email.

Or maybe it’s more like a breakup. The way missing her changes everything. The way you wonder, at odd moments throughout the day: what’s she doing now? The way you can’t really picture it — you don’t know enough.

It changed the way I wrote, and it changed what I wrote about.

Don’t try to blend in. Nothing’s going to make you look more like a tourist than loose-fitting jeans or khakis and solid-color t-shirts.

I’m not sure why I listened — I’m not sure why I didn’t roll my eyes the way I did when he corrected my pronunciation of Van Gogh or tempura — but I did.

She grew up — she had to grow up. Like everyone does. She discovered her own books, books I’d never read — books that hadn’t been written yet when I was a child. It’s what’s supposed to happen.

I find myself thinking sometimes about how much I would have liked the young woman she has become — how wonderful it would have been to know her — when I was the age she is now.

He didn’t want to die, that Saturday morning at 5 AM. He just finally knew that he was going to. I don’t think he ever believed it before then — no more than my mother did, no more than my brother did.