Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarra… - Anne Lamott

Maybe, I thought, after a few months of sobriety, you could successfully smoke marijuana again, or maybe every anniversary you got to have one glass of a perfectly chilled California Chardonnay.

This is where I liked to be when I was hangover or coming down off a cocaine binge, here in the dust with all these dusty people, all this liveliness and clutter and color, things for sale to cheer me up, and greasy food that would slip down by throat.

Books! To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair is literally how I have survived being here at all.