boundless;

it does a masterful job of keeping less tangible, more daunting matters at bay. The flood of options is reduced to a manageable trickle. Unnamed anxieties are replaced with tangible ones. The formidable social and personal questions that might plague a woman (how to be in the world, how much space to occupy, where to direct her energy, how much to

The freedom to choose, in other words, means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.

This strategy was hardy unique. Whole bodies of work on teenage girls (most notably Carol Gilligan’s) have suggested that girls lose themselves in adolescence, that confidence and spirit and voice begin to go up in smoke, and that this is essentially a culturally supported phenomenon, the result of a girl’s growing awareness that the things she mos

I learned what legions of good, approval-hungry girls learn, which was to want what others wanted for me.

cards: A-minus, A-plus.

Women are actually superb at math; they just happen to engage in their own variety of it, an intricate personal math in which desires are split off from one another, weighed, balance, traded, assessed. These are the mathematics of desire, a system of self-limitation

I go to a restaurant with a group of women and pray that we can order lunch without falling into the semi-covert

What liberates a person enough to indulge appetite, to take pleasure in the world, to enjoy being alive? Within that question lies the true holy grail, the heart of a woman’s hunger.