If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.

Married at 23, a mother at 24, and blindsided by divorce at 28, I found myself struggling, like many young women I meet today, to strike a balance between my personal life and my career.

Very few women manage to have it all; certainly not all at once.

I was devastated when I got the review for my first book. The book came out a couple years before the women's movement broke through, and people were putting it down, asking, 'Why does the woman in this book need to get a divorce? Why can't she just shut up and be happy?'

You would think with me living in Los Angeles I would go to the beach all the time, but we don't. It's the same as visiting the Statue of Liberty. If you don't live in N.Y.C., it's the first stop on your family vacation, but if you live there, you only go if you have relatives visiting from out of town!

I know for my wife and I, we always loved the idea of being young parents. It is an incredibly inspiring and challenging job being a parent, and as it turns out, being young really helps you keep up.

My priority will be my family in the years to come.

Poverty was my mother's midwife. She had her children in poverty. But she also found a road to bring us a sense of purpose, and she taught us how to be valiant in the face of oppression.