The Latest from ExEd Publishing

Nobody tells you that one of the hardest parts of starting over is that you have to make friends again, from nothing, as an adult, with no structure to do it for you. For most of a life, friendship is a byproduct. School gives it to you. Work gives it to you. Your children's schools give it to you, which is how a large number of women end up with a social world composed entirely of people they met through a nine-year-old. It feels like you are good at friendship. What is actu

There is a Japanese idiom built from the characters for four trees. Cherry, plum, peach, and apricot. Oubaitori. All four blossom in spring. None of them blossom at the same time, in the same way, or for the same length of days. The plum comes early and stubborn, sometimes through snow. The cherry arrives in an overwhelming week and then is gone. Nobody stands in an orchard and asks why the apricot is running behind. The idiom means: do not compare. Not in the flattened socia

In Japan there is an old practice called kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery. When a bowl shatters, the pieces are not hidden or discarded. They are joined back together with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, so that the cracks are not disguised but illuminated. The repair becomes the most beautiful part of the object. The bowl is worth more, and means more, for having been broken and mended in the light. I cannot think of a more useful idea to carry into the second

There is a quiet cruelty in the idea that by a certain age your life is supposed to be finished being built. That the choices are made, the shape is set, and what remains is simply to live inside the house you have already constructed. I believed a version of that story for a long time, right up until my own life declined to cooperate with it. I rebuilt mine in my fifties. Not by choice, at first, and not all at once. A life I thought was permanent came apart, and I found mys

People sometimes ask why the lotus. Why name a book series, and half an imprint, after one particular flower. The honest answer is that the lotus knows something I spent most of my life learning the hard way, and I wanted to be reminded of it every time I sat down to write. The lotus does not grow in clear water. It grows in mud. It roots itself in the murk at the bottom of a pond, in exactly the kind of place we are taught to be ashamed of, and it uses that muck as food. The