I was semi-proud of myself last night for not flubbing up someone else’s freshly caught yellow fin tuna. I was at a dinner party and their neighbor had just dropped off a slab of tuna he had reeled in hours prior. It was a gorgeous blood-pink and terrific without any kind of fuss [...]

EATHoecakeWhat: Thin cornbread cake baked on a griddle like a pancake. Perfect for brunches or bbq’s.Why: It’s called ‘Hoecake.’
WEARDouble Velcro Sandal from Bebe.What: A sexy, cool platform shoe.Why: You’re a hoecake.
DRINKThe End of June MartiniWhat: I’m improvising, so you figure out the amount, but do this: put Blue Curacao, some icecubes, sugar (or sub), [...]

So I’m looking through the Pottery Barn catalog and there lies on a mahogany “Metropoloitan Occasional Table,” which is purported to have “sturdy construction and design details like flared molding and tapered legs,” my novel, The Descendants. You can barely see it (especially in this scanned picture) what with all the other stuff–the seahorse [...]

Sigh. I tire of “parenting experts,” parenting books, manuals, seminars, television segments. I’ve been told that non-fiction parenting books sell, but I could never muster the strength to advise. I mean I was accidentally knocked up in a snowed-in cabin in Tahoe so I’m hardly the parenting expert, and if I did [...]

I get these email updates from Daily Candy. I don’t read them very often, but I do like their Weekend Guide–I guess I’m mostly drawn to the format. So, I’m totally going to copy it and do my own weekend guide.I will call it “How to Live This Weekend.” Here goes…

READSweetwater [...]

“I’ll have a Pinot, I guess. Merlot’s out, right?”–woman at a restaurant
“…She’s not my mom. She’s my babysitter. I have two babysitters.”“Why?”“’Cause I was adopted.”“Oh. How do you know?”“My second mom told me.”“How come you were adopted?”“I don’t know. Someone needed money.”–conversation between two young boys at the playground
“I would [...]

I wrote the following for a guest-blogging stint at Powell’s
The other day I noticed my body lotion whose label read, “Morey Butter,” had been tampered with. The ‘y’ and the ‘er’ had been rubbed out so that my lotion was now called, “More Butt.” “Did you do this?” I asked my husband, [...]

Lucky Pierre? Dirty Sanchez? Hum Job? If you want to know what these words mean, pick up a copy of “Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex”, edited by dirty girl extraordinaire, Ellen Sussman. The book is a lexicon of the libido, defined by one hundred or so authors, both famous (Ravi Shankar, [...]

I have published two books– “House of Thieves”and “The Descendants”(now out in paperback. You should totally buy it)–so you’d think I could answer this question with some kind of authority. I have written four books, actually, but only the aforementioned two have been sold and published. In regards to the other [...]

I felt like Gloria Steinam this morning after reading the Disney, truncated version of Snow White to my daughter. She has a stack of princess books (given to her by my mom). They’re like Cliff Notes–the idiotic messages can be absorbed in an instant. It actually says, “When the dwarfs learned that Snow White could [...]

I recently wrote about my dislike for one of my daughter’s friends and how I felt bad about it. Well, not anymore! Turns out that a lot of you parents are just as bad as I am. When kids hit, one mom explains to her son it’s because “They’re stupid.” Another [...]