I looked at the gentle arc of the horizon and I smiled softly at the girl I used to be, at her longing for the faraway. I felt her, still inside me, still yearning, still restless. And I knew she would be with me always. I leaned back. I couldn’t wait to get to America. Because if you never leave home, you will never have a home to return to. And

didn’t want to do with my life what others did with theirs simply because it was what was expected of me.

Beginnings, like endings, are slippery. Because everything exists in the middle. There was something before, and there will be something after.

To me, a good actor is misunderstood and underappreciated, and I sometimes think the problem is with the word itself. Because the word actor connotes acting rather than action, it carries a suggestion of make-believe or pretend when, in fact, the actor’s job is not to act like a character but to act as that character.

My experiences on set bonded me to Suso in new ways. Now when I sat with her, I had a better understanding of her as a storyteller, as someone who looked at the world through a lens of narrative. In every shop and café, she saw a location, in every lunch guest a character, in every conversation a scene.

those Italian gesticulations that are sometimes whimsical and other times savage.

it’s the fans who create the star as much as the star who creates the fans. They give and withhold their attention, and the star quickly learns what is expected.

As I stood there, I felt alone but not lonely, at peace with myself but also restless, eager to keep going. I also felt a sense of place root inside me, and I remember thinking, perhaps for the first time in my life, that I might never move again.

It was a fence across the open field of my life. I resented the imposition of a boundary where none had existed before and where one need not have existed at all. It wasn’t long before more fences were constructed, and while they were intended to bring order where chaos was perceived to reign, they instead caused me to look beyond them, to fixate