Koren Zailckas

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

As long as we depend on other women for self-esteem, using them as bad examples or fantasy versions - special, powerful - of ourselves, they remain stuck in a narcissistic version of themselves, too.

America, ever the narcissistic mother, prefers baby bumps to children and expectant mothers to full-fledged bum-and-nose-wiping ones.

I think statistics go in one ear and out the other. All of us respond to stories more than numbers.

My parents always swore that in my childhood they had to let me win at board games. If, by the lucky stroke of the plastic wheel, my father would accidentally beat me at Candy Land, I would fly into fits of bawling that I'm told would last for hours. If I couldn't triumph, I didn't want to play.

If mothers are our first teachers, then having a narcissistic one teaches us that human closeness is terrifying, and the world is a heartless, inconsistent place.