Sandra Lee Quotes

Attitude Is Everything We live in a culture that is blind to betrayal and intolerant of emotional pain. In New Age crowds here on the West Coast, where your attitude is considered the sole determinant of the impact an event has on you, it gets even worse.In these New Thought circles, no matter what happens to you, it is assumed that you have created your own reality. Not only have you chosen the event, no matter how horrible, for your personal growth. You also chose how you interpret what happened—as if there are no interpersonal facts, only interpretations. The upshot of this perspective is that your suffering would vanish if only you adopted a more evolved perspective and stopped feeling aggrieved. I was often kindly reminded (and believed it myself), “there are no victims.” How can you be a victim when you are responsible for your circumstances? When you most need validation and support to get through the worst pain of your life, to be confronted with the well-meaning, but quasi-religious fervor of these insidious half-truths can be deeply demoralizing. This kind of advice feeds guilt and shame, inhibits grieving, encourages grandiosity and can drive you to be alone to shield your vulnerability.

Betrayal annihilates trust. The more trust there is to begin with, and the more deception is involved, the more damage is done.

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t believe you. You can’t be a cop.” “Not a cop.” “Federal agent?” “FBI.” “Even more unlikely.” “J. Edgar rolls over in his grave every day, but that’s the way it is.

Put your hands on me. Pretend this means something - Lee Coburn

He also knew that whenever he recalled her kissing his cheek with such unqualified trust and acceptance, it was going to ache just a little in the vicinity of his heart. It ached now.

But I'm not a hearts and flowers guy. I'm not even an all-night guy. I don't hold hands. I don't cuddle. I don't do any of that stuff. - Lee Coburn

Blame is a Defense Against Powerlessness Betrayal trauma changes you. You have endured a life-altering shock, and are likely living with PTSD symptoms— hypervigilance, flashbacks and bewilderment—with broken trust, with the inability to cope with many situations, and with the complete shut down of parts of your mind, including your ability to focus and regulate your emotions. Nevertheless, if you are unable to recognize the higher purpose in your pain, to forgive and forget and move on, you clearly have chosen to be addicted to your pain and must enjoy playing the victim. And the worst is, we are only too ready to agree with this assessment! Trauma victims commonly blame themselves. Blaming oneself for the shame of being a victim is recognized by trauma specialists as a defense against the extreme powerlessness we feel in the wake of a traumatic event. Self-blame continues the illusion of control shock destroys, but prevents us from the necessary working through of the traumatic feelings and memories to heal and recover.

You don't have to give me flowers, Coburn. You don't even have to hold me. Let me hold you. - Honor Gillette

I loved Eddie. You know that, Stan. He'll be enshrined in my heart until I draw my last breath. But he can't be enshrined in my life. I've got to let go and move on. So do you.

....I came to consider betrayal a moral violation of another's humanity—akin to torture.

We must pass through acute loneliness to learn that we are not alone.

Few things are as painful as the unfulfilled desire to be near to another you love.

Moving between her thighs, he stretched out above her, then thrust into her. Once. Because, as he did everything, he acted without hesitation or apology to claim her entirely. Her eyes went wide and her breath caught. Holding her gaze, he pressed himself deeper, barely easing back before pressing deep again.

(Coburn)“Honor.” Gasping, she lowered her arm from over her eyes and looked into his face. “Put your hands on me. Pretend this means something.” With a whimper, she wrapped her arms around him and clutched his back, then slid her hands down over his ass and drew him even deeper into her. He groaned, buried his face in the hollow of her neck, and rocked his body against hers. An orgasm burst through her at the same time he came. She pretended nothing.

Doral asked if Coburn’s neighbors had been interviewed. “By me personally,” Fred replied. “Everybody in the apartment complex knew him by sight. Women thought he was attractive in that certain kind of way.” “What certain kind of way?” “Wished they could fuck him, but considered him bad news.” “That’s a ‘way’?” “Of course that’s a ‘way.’

Those who claim that any woman can reprogram her consciousness if only she is sufficiently determined hold a shallow view of the nature of patriarchal oppression. Anything done can be undone, it is implied; nothing has been permanently damaged, nothing irretrievably lost. But this is tragically false. One of the evils of a system of oppression is that it may damage people in ways that cannot always be undone. Patriarchy invades the intimate recesses of personality where it may maim and cripple the spirit forever.

And then he pressed into her. First his thighs, then his middle, his chest, and finally his mouth. She made a whimpering sound, but its definition was unclear even to her, until she realized that her arms had gone around him instinctually, and that she was clutching his back, his shoulders, her hands restless and greedy for the feel of him. He kissed her openmouthed, using his tongue, and when she kissed back, she felt the hum that vibrated deep inside his chest. It was the kind of hungry sound she hadn’t heard in a long time. Masculine and carnal, it thrilled and aroused her.

Whatever else you were about to say, don't. Don't look at me all calf-eyed. Don't nurse any romantic options about me just because I told you that you're pretty or related a sob story about some old horse. - Lee Coburn

His gut was stitched up good and tight, but that didn’t prevent it from flopping. He wiped his damp palms on the legs of his jeans and stood up shakily, leaning heavily on his cane. He called himself a masochist for putting himself through this torture day after day. He braced himself for the disappointment of having to go home alone. He braced himself for happiness like he’d never known in his entire life. He watched the door they would come through.

He had to admit: She’d got to him. This demure second-grade schoolteacher, who’d been faithful to her husband, but who had fucked him with the same fervor with which she’d fought him two days ago, had crawled under his mean ol’ hide.

He braced himself for happiness like he’d never known in his entire life.

praised by James Patterson, Dean Koontz, Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Tess Gerritsen, Jeffery Deaver, Sandra Brown, James Rollins, Brad Thor, Nick Stone, David Morrell, Allison Brennan, Heather Graham, Linwood Barclay, Peter Robinson, Håkan

Under the current ‘tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours of a woman’s body takes on as she matures - the fuller breasts and rounded hips - have become distateful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.

His entire aspect was menacing, starting with his chilling eyes and the pronounced bone structure of his face. He was tall and lean, but the skin on his arms was stretched over muscles that looked as taut as whipcord. The backs of his hands were bumpy with strong veins. His clothes and hair had snagged natural debris—twigs, sprigs of moss, small leaves. He seemed indifferent to all that, just as he did to the mud caked on his boots and the legs of his jeans. He smelled of the swamp, of sweat, of danger.

Trauma silences a person. It shatters your identity, and along with it, much of what you thought you knew.

The experience of shame may tend to lend legitimacy to the structure of authority that occasions it, for the majesty of judgment is affirmed in its very capacity to injure.

The intensity of his expression caused her to tentatively ask, “What?” “I’ve never been a big fan of the missionary position.” Not quite sure how to respond to that, she said simply, “Oh.” “I preferred making it any other way.” “Why?” “Because it didn’t have anything to do with getting off.” “What didn’t?” “Looking into the woman’s face.” He murmured the statement as though puzzled by it. Her throat grew tight. She reached up and stroked his cheek. “You wanted to look into mine?

(Honor)“You had told me that if you didn’t return within a few minutes of ten o’clock, I was to drive away and get as far from Tambour as possible. So, for all you knew, that’s what I had done. After nearly dying in that explosion, with a burn on your shoulder, and your hair singed, you could have run in any given direction in order to get away, but you didn’t. When you found me on the railroad tracks, you were racing back to the garage. To me.” He didn’t say anything, but his jaw tensed. She smiled and moved closer to him, aligning her body along his. “You don’t have to give me flowers, Coburn. You don’t even have to hold me.” She laid her head on his chest just below his chin. Her hand curved around his neck. “Let me hold you.

Some of us will admit to a simple fascination with the inner world for its own sake, a fascination with no further goal than the thrill of discovery, the pleasure of engaging the mysterious, dark ground of our own nature.

Existentialist literature provides a more satisfactory account of the persistence of feminine narcissism. Simone de Beauvoir makes use of the existentialist conception of 'situation' in order to account for the persistence of narcissism in the feminine personality. A woman's situation, i.e., those meanings derived from the total context in which she comes to maturity, disposes her to apprehend her body not as the instrument of her transcendence, but as 'an object destined for another.' Knowing that she is to be subjected to the cold appraisal of the male connoisseur and that her life prospects may depend on how she is seen, a woman learns to appraise herself first. The sexual objectification of women produces a duality in feminine consciousness. The gaze of the Other is internalized so that I myself become at once seer and seen, appraiser and the thing appraised.

If he turned his hand into her and began stroking her there, she would wake up smiling and drowsy and ready for him again. They would kiss. Erotically. Her mouth would be so damn enticing, he’d dip into it again and again to gather the taste that was now familiar to him. He would touch his tongue to her nipples, and she’d rub her thumb around the tip of his cock and feel that he was about to burst, and then he’d be inside her, moving. Or maybe not. Maybe he would do something he’d never done with a woman. Maybe he would just… be. [...] No, maybe this time, he would just savor being joined to another person as tightly as two people could be. He would savor being joined with Honor.

If we want to truly live, at some point, we find the dark facts of psychic life demand our full attention.

Why isn't every woman a feminist? Feminism tells a tale of female injury, but the average woman in heterosexual intimacy knows that men are injured too, as indeed they are. She may be willing to grant, this average woman, that men in general have more power than women in general. This undoubted fact is merely a fact; it is abstract, while the man of flesh and blood who stands before her is concrete: His hurts are real, his fears palpable. And like those heroic doctors on the late show who work tirelessly through the epidemic even though they may be fainting from fatigue, the woman in intimacy may set her own needs to one side in order better to attend to his. She does this not because she is "chauvinized" or has "false consciousness," but because this is what the work requires. Indeed, she may even excuse the man's abuse of her, having glimpsed the great reservoir of pain and rage from which it issues. Here is a further gloss on the ethical disempowerment attendant upon women's caregiving: in such a situation, a woman may be tempted to collude in her own ill-treatment.

Indeed, the exigencies of female tenderness are such as virtually to guarantee the man's absolution by the woman--not on her terms, but on his. Moreover, the man's confession of fear or failure tends to mystify the woman's understanding not only of the power dimensions of the relationship between herself and this particular man, but of the relations of power between men and women in general.

The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women.

While women suffer from our relative lack of power in the world and often resent it, certain dimensions of this powerlessness may seem abstract and remote. We know, for example, that we rarely get to make the laws or direct the major financial institutions. But Wall Street and the U.S. Congress seem very far away. The power a woman feels in herself to heal and sustain, on the other hand--"the power of love"--is, once again, concrete and very near: It is like a field of force emanating from within herself, a great river flowing outward from her very person. Thus, a complex and contradictory female subjectivity is constructed within the relations of caregiving. Here, as elsewhere, women are affirmed in some way and diminished in others, this within the unity of a single act. The woman who provides a man with largely unreciprocated emotional sustenance accords him status and pays him homage; she agrees to the unspoken proposition that his doings are important enough to deserve substantially more attention than her own. But even as the man's supremacy in the relationship is tacitly assumed by both parties to the transaction, the man reveals himself to his caregiver as vulnerable and insecure. And while she may well be ethically and epistemically disempowered by the care she gives, this caregiving affords her a feeling that a mighty power resides within her being. The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women. Similarly, the feeling that one's love is a mighty force for the good in the life of the beloved doesn't make it so, as Milena Jesenka found, to her sorrow. The feeling of out-flowing personal power so characteristic of the caregiving woman is quite different from the having of any actual power in the world. There is no doubt that this sense of personal efficacy provides some compensation for the extra-domestic power women are typically denied: If one cannot be a king oneself, being a confidante of kings may be the next best thing. But just as we make a bad bargain in accepting an occasional Valentine in lieu of the sustained attention we deserve, we are ill advised to settle for a mere feeling of power, however heady and intoxicating it may be, in place of the effective power we have every right to exercise in the world.

Grace had turned to Leeza, Ken, her boyfriend, Brian, and baking. She started by baking the family recipes from her childhood. Cinnamon buns, gingersnaps, saffron bread, and lingonberry pancakes. Grace knew she didn't have her mother's talent, but she tried her best and hoped it might also bring her mother back to earth. Maybe even bring the two of them closer. One afternoon, Grace made a German chocolate cake. She decided to try something different, and added fresh local Door County sour cherries to the batter. When Ken tasted it, he'd fallen on the floor, exclaiming, "I'm dead, but at least I went to heaven: Death by chocolate!

The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman's consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.

It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals. I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film No Reservations made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick Mostly Martha.) On Hell’s Kitchen, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could ever stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on Gordon’s behalf. And he’s the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports. The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it. I wish, really, that I was so far up my own ass that I could somehow believe myself to be some kind of standard-bearer for good eating—or ombudsman, or even the deliverer of thoughtful critique. But that wouldn’t be true, would it? I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.” And I’m still angry. But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay? I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that’ll haunt me long after I’m crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed. Okay, I still would advise against the fish special at T.G.I. McSweenigan’s, “A Place for Beer,” on a Monday. Fresh fish, I’d guess, is probably not the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks. The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing. And even if he doesn’t, these days he has to figure that you might actually know the difference. Back when I wrote the book that changed my life, I was angriest—like a lot of chefs and cooks of my middling abilities—at my customers. They’ve changed. I’ve changed. About them, I’m not angry anymore.

I'm not searching for some mysterious, unattainable person, place or thing. I'm experiencing life!

I, or any mortal at any time, may be utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in. —C. S. Lewis

Letting someone believe something that is not true produces the same result as saying something false: It is the passive version of lying.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. —Anne Lamott

El estrógeno estimula el crecimiento del sistema de recolección de leche (ductal), mientras que la progesterona estimula el crecimiento del sistema de producción de leche.

One variant of what I have been calling the "standard view" is the "safety-valve theory." The claim is sometimes made that women's emotional caregiving does more than secure psychological benefits to individual men: This caregiving is said to shore up the patriarchal system as a whole by helping to stabilize the characteristic institutions of contemporary patriarchal society. These institutions, it is claimed, are marked by hierarchy, hence by unequal access to power, and by impersonality, alienated labor, and abstract instrumental rationality. Now men pay a heavy price for their participation in such a system, even though the system as such allows men generally to exercise more power than women generally. The disclosure of a person's deepest feelings is dangerous under conditions of competition and impersonality: A man runs the risk of displaying fear or vulnerability if he says too much. Hence, men must sacrifice the possibility of frank and intimate ties with one another; they must abandon the possibility of emotional release in one another's company. Instead, they must appear tough, controlled, and self sufficient, in command at all times. Now, so the argument goes, the emotional price men pay for participation in this system would be unacceptable high, were women not there to lower it. Women are largely excluded from the arenas wherein men struggle for prestige; because of this and by virtue of our socialization into patterns of nurturance, women are well situated to repair the emotional damage men inflict on one another. Women's caregiving is said to function as a "safety valve" that allows the release of emotional tensions generated by a fundamentally inhuman system. Without such release, these tensions might explode the set of economic and political relationships wherein they are now uneasily contained. Hence, women are importantly involved in preventing the destabilization of a system in which some men oppress other men and men generally oppress women generally.

Why isn't every woman a feminist? Feminism tells a tale of female injury, but the average woman in heterosexual intimacy knows that men are injured too, as indeed they are. She may be willing to grant, this average woman, that men in general have more power than women in general. This undoubted fact is merely a fact; it is *abstract*, while the man of flesh and blood who stands before her is *concrete*: His hurts are real, his fears palpable. And like those heroic doctors on the late show who work tirelessly through the epidemic even though they may be fainting from fatigue, the woman in intimacy may set her own needs to one side in order better to attend to his. She does this not because she is "chauvinized" or has "false consciousness," but because *this is what the work requires*. Indeed, she may even excuse the man's abuse of her, having glimpsed the great reservoir of pain and rage from which it issues. Here is further gloss on the ethical disempowerment attendant upon women's caregiving: In such a situation, a woman may be tempted to collude in her own ill-treatment.

La violence au sein du couple profite de la fragilité de la position des femmes dans al société. Se référant aux travaux de sa consœur américaine Sandra Lee Bartky, la philosophe Camille Froidevaux-Metterie parle de la honte comme « structurellement féminine ». Elle la définit comment un « sentiment permanent d'inadéquation par lequel les femmes se sentent imparfaites, inférieures ou diminuées, ce qui permet aux mécanismes de la domination masculine de perdurer ». Ainsi, « la honte devient un véritable mode d'être-au-monde féminin qui fait le lit de la violence conjugale et des féminicides ». Il ne s'agit surtout pas de prétendre que, par leur manque de confiance en elles, les femmes susciteraient les mauvais traitements qu'elles subissent : nous reprocher un conditionnement qui nous dessert reviendrait à nous infliger une double peine. Les seuls responsables des violences sont ceux qui les commettent et la culture qui les y autorise - culture que nous allons tenter d'étudier ici. Mais de même qu'on peut rappeler haut et fort que la seule cause du viol, c'est le violeur, tout en enseignant l'autodéfense physique, on peut chercher à développe une forme d'autodéfense psychologique. (p. 102)

The Lee Shore" Wheel gull spin and glide ... you've got no place to hide 'Cause you don't need one All along the lee shore shells lie scattered in the sand Winking up like shining eyes at me, from the sea Here is one like sunrise older than you know It's still lying there where some careless wave Forgot it long ago When I awoke this morning Dove beneath my floating home Down below her graceful side In the turning tide To watch the sea fish roam And there I heard a story From the sailors of the Sandra Marie There's another island a day's run away from here It's empty and free From here to Venezuela nothing more to see Than a hundred thousand islands Flung like jewels upon the sea For you and me Sunset smells of dinner Women are calling at me to end my tales But perhaps I'll see you the next quiet place I furl my sails 4 Way Street (1971)

You believe Lee, don't you? That the other side exists?"  Her voice rattled, each word interspersed with a brief gasp of breath. I wanted her to stop talking, to save her breath, but it scared me, the way she asked me. What did she want me to say? I couldn't lie to her on her deathbed, for Christ's sake. Her eyes were clear, boring into me; she'd see right through me, always could.

Love has a quote. For every five people who fall in love, only one will be happy. The other four will love someone who does not love them back. Or they'll love without learning anything. OR they'll love no one. Or they'll just not experience love at all. Sandra laughed with disbelief. Look around you, the Writer said. Look at all your friends and your office mates. How many of them are truly happy? But happiness is relative, Sandra said. A rationalization that unhappy people make, the Writer said.

Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization. To apprehend one-self as victim is to be aware of an alien and hostile force outside of oneself which is responsible for the blatantly unjust treatment of women and which enforces a stifling and oppressive system of sex-role differentiation. For some feminists, this hostile power is “society” or “the system”; for others, it is simply men. Victimization is impartial, even though its damage is done to each one of us personally. One is victimized as a woman, as one among many. In the realization that others are made to suffer in the same way I am made to suffer lies the beginning of a sense of solidarity with other victims. To come to see oneself as victim, to have such an altered perception of oneself and of one’s society is not to see things in the same old way while merely judging them differently or to superimpose new attitudes on things like frosting a cake. The consciousness of victimization is immediate and revelatory; it allows us to discover what social reality is really like. The consciousness of victimization is a divided consciousness. To see myself as victim is to know that I have already sustained injury, that I live exposed to injury, that I have been at worst mutilated, at best diminished in my being. But at the same time, feminist consciousness is a joyous consciousness of one’s own power, of the possibility of unprecedented personal growth and the release of energy long suppressed. Thus, feminist consciousness is both consciousness of weakness and consciousness of strength. But this division in the way we apprehend ourselves has a positive effect, for it leads to the search both for ways of overcoming those weaknesses in ourselves which support the system and for direct forms of struggle against the system itself. The consciousness of victimization may be a consciousness divided in a second way. The awareness I have of myself as victim may rest uneasily alongside the awareness that I am also and at the same time enormously privileged, more privileged than the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. I myself enjoy both white-skin privilege and the privileges of comparative affluence. In our society, of course, women of color are not so fortunate; white women, as a group and on average, are substantially more economically advantaged than many persons of color, especially women of color; white women have better housing and education, enjoy lower rates of infant and maternal mortality, and, unlike many poor persons of color, both men and women, are rarely forced to live in the climate of street violence that has become a standard feature of urban poverty. But even women of color in our society are relatively advantaged in comparison to the appalling poverty of women in, e.g., Africa and Latin America. Many women do not develop a consciousness divided in this way at all: they see themselves, to be sure, as victims of an unjust system of social power, but they remain blind to the extent to which they themselves are implicated in the victimization of others. What this means is that the “raising” of a woman’s consciousness is, unfortunately, no safeguard against her continued acquiescence in racism, imperialism, or class oppression. Sometimes, however, the entry into feminist consciousness, for white women especially, may bring in its wake a growth in political awareness generally: The disclosure of one’s own oppression may lead to an understanding of a range of misery to which one was heretofore blind.

To apprehend myself as victim in a sexist society is to know that there are few places where I can hide, that I can be attacked almost anywhere, at any time, by virtually anyone. Innocent chatter, the currency of ordinary social life, or a compliment (“You don’t think like a woman”), the well-intentioned advice of psychologists, the news item, the joke, the cosmetics advertisement—none of these is what it is or what it was. Each reveals itself, depending on the circumstances in which it appears, as a threat, an insult, an affront, as a reminder, however, subtle, that I belong to an inferior caste. In short, these are revealed as instruments of oppression or as articulations of a sexist institution. Since many things are not what they seem to be and since many apparently harmless sorts of things can suddenly exhibit a sinister dimension, social reality is revealed as deceptive.

Americanah; Ayad Akhtar, American Dervish; Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Teju Cole, Open City; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds; Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban and King of Cuba; Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker.

I have a car to drop us off." He pointed to a sleek, black Escalade, and a uniformed driver leaped out to open the doors. Ken leaned over and whispered, "Nice touch." Grace wondered when the last time was that New London had seen a chauffeur. Von must have booked the service through Green Bay. He always did know how to make the grand gesture. Like when he'd brought her three dozen pink roses to match her rose-colored chiffon prom dress. And then there was the crowning touch, a small box of fresh strawberries dipped in his family's legendary Vasser chocolate. She could still practically taste the berries, ripe and sweet, with the contrast of the bittersweet dark chocolate.

What's a lingonberry?" "It's a fruit that grows in the forest, in Sweden. You've probably had lingonberry jam at your grandmother's house. We always had it when I was growing up; like other kids had grape jam, we had lingonberry. Your grandmother always used to say lingonberry jam is like Swedish summer in a jar. The Swedes love their lingonberries. It's not so sweet, sort of like cranberry sauce.

We did it, Mom! I knew we'd pull it off," Emma said as she shared her scrambled eggs with Halo the next morning at breakfast. Since they'd moved back to Wisconsin, Halo had become a bona fide Midwesterner, preferring mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs to seeds or fruits.

They unpacked the fresh vegetables that they'd picked up at Gelson's and fell into their well-practiced teamwork, slicing the vegetables and throwing them onto the patio grill. Grace manned the tongs, but she could barely focus on the food, the sunset tonight was so spectacular. Within minutes, Ken arranged the vegetables over a bed of greens on a board, and, with a drizzle of dressing, a sprinkling of crumbled organic goat cheese, and a handful of pine nuts, dinner was ready. Ken could always make the simplest setting look photo shoot-ready. "This salad is guaranteed to pull you out of that pity party. It's so fresh and good for you, you can eat it without any guilt whatsoever.