Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life

by Anna Quindlen

Life must be lived forward but understood backward. — SØREN KIERKEGAARD

You don’t know what you don’t know when you’re young. How could you?

Maybe that’s why we give advice, when we’re older, mostly to people who don’t want to hear it. They can’t hear it because

When I was first challenged to do the headstand and insisted I was too old to learn a new trick, someone told me that story about a fifty-year-old woman who says she can’t get a college degree at

christening, the bride at every

stories. But personal experience is the trump card. Progress is always relative. Sometimes it’s not even real. I once heard Claudia Kennedy, at the time the only three-star female general in the Army, talk about the question of critical

MS: Right. My mother says, “Worry is interest paid on trouble that hasn’t happened yet. Relax.”