Therapists have tremendous power over their vulnerable clients, and it is very easy to take advantage of this power.
In 1990, when I had just arrived in New York City as a wet-behind-the-ears 20-something girl from Arizona, I spent a year or more working as the personal secretary and secret ghostwriter to an American-born countess in her apartment on the Upper East Side.
As my family saw them, men were untrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway.
I grew up in an all-female family - two sisters and a mostly single mother - and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them.
It gives me immense pleasure to be trustworthy, faithful, and true - to have the kind of romantic bond that inspires this.
In literature, older women are not often given center stage.
As an adult I generally feel this pressure to be thin, not from men, but from other women. As a silent or not-so-silent competition, a constant monitoring of who's thinner, comments about it - either compliments or veiled insults doesn't matter - it always drives me nuts.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes.
I remember the moment I first became aware of aging. I was 30. I looked down at my knees, and the skin above them had become a little loose. And I thought, 'And so it begins!'
If I fell into one relationship after another with men who were either emotionally tuned out and unavailable or hotheaded and controlling, or both, it was because I was lacking in good sense about men.