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By a considerable margin, my family's largest-ever financial expenditure was the adoption of our two sons.

It is true for my family and many others: Adoption has made us infinitely richer in the ways that matter most.

My husband and I adopted our children through a private agency, Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children. As a nonprofit organization, it relies on client fees as well as donor support to do its work.

Contemporary families can be made in many ways. You might step up when relatives or friends are unable to meet their obligation to their children. You might marry someone who is already a parent. Or you might, as in my case, yearn to create a family and decide to adopt.

Form ossifies into genre through repetition.

A writer cannot be judged for his project, only its execution.

Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist.

Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader.

It comforts the adult conscience to remember that, amid history's grave injustices, there were still great lives.

History is a story like any other, but black history is a story so devoid of logic that it frustrates the young reader. The young readers in my house, told of slavery and segregation, asked in disbelief, 'What? Why?' We - the parents of black children, the parents of all children - still need to tell that story.

The person most qualified to tell the tale of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the man himself, as gifted an intellect as he is an athlete.

When I was somewhere between child and adult, my father left us. My first family broke apart, but this liberated me to create a new family as I pleased.

I married the man I love when the state of California said I could. We made a family through adoption, as New York State said we could. From the outside, our family - two dads, two sons via adoption - seems like an experiment, but what family isn't an experiment?

I mourn for the kind of dad I didn't have; I rue my first broken family while taking joy in the one that I've made.

Family is whatever you say it is.

Among this country's enduring myths is that success is virtuous, while the wealth by which we measure success is incidental. We tell ourselves that money cannot buy happiness, but what is incontrovertible is that money buys stuff, and if stuff makes you happy, well, complete the syllogism.

I don't have a Winslow Homer or a Renoir, but I do have the liberty to live as I like.

I am a binge reader, with a tendency to throw myself at a writer, immerse myself in their work.

I love fiction's ability to allow me to inhabit a wholly different life.

That's part of fashion's promise: that a girlfriend or boyfriend or a promotion are just one tie or sweater or pair of shoes away.

Fashion is about fantasy.

I've spent many hours of my life browsing in stores. At 21, I admired clothes I couldn't afford. At 30, I bought them. At 40, I sometimes go simply for the pleasure, of seeing what is new, of learning what counts as beautiful now.

Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon.

To be five years old is to be surprised by life. I'm amused by my children's awe at quotidian things - a toy helicopter, a bubble bath, the visible tentacles on a plate of calamari. And I'm envious of their ability to attain something I often can't: a state of transcendence induced by art.

Instead of a passion for the Yankees or fly-fishing or birding, I want to pass on to my sons a love of books, music, and art. I accept that this is partly about the gratification of my own ego, but it's also one of the only ways I know of making a rich life. That's what we all want for our progeny.

When my husband and I first became parents, we joked that our chubby baby was destined to grow into an Alex P. Keaton Reaganite - the most unlikely, and therefore hilarious, course for the child of an interracial gay couple in gentrifying Brooklyn.

If you've ever watched a television cartoon, you know that kids don't appreciate subtlety, though perhaps that's because they're not often offered it.

Some writers are prolific; some are shape-shifters. It's rare and intimidating to encounter one who is both.

In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.

There are probably some readers who don't want a great American writer to acknowledge that cleaning out the bottom drawer of the refrigerator has ever crossed their mind.

For many writers, the endless performance of being a writer - tweeting, appearing, making the rounds - is required simply to attract enough attention to make a living.

It's my own personal hang-up, but I find adults who are picky eaters to be the worst. I don't mean food allergies or preferences: I mean picky eaters. We all know one, and they're impossible to go to lunch with or invite over for a dinner party.

Baking is a matter of precision and timing, but I just make things up as I go.

I have a theory that because my kitchen is small, you can't preheat an oven and deal with dough at the same time, although maybe it's just that I'm a bad baker.

Does a bona fide chimichurri have cilantro in it? Who cares? Cooking for your family, unless your family includes Joel Rubouchon, is liberating in that regard.

There is a tendency to presume autobiography in fiction by women or minorities. Guys named Jonathan write universal stories, while there's this sense that everyone else is just fictionalizing their own small experiences.

Obama-as-dad is my favorite Obama. Obama-as-executive, with his stubborn faith in reasonableness in times absent of reason, presided over the country during its descent into madness. I find it a comfort that Obama-as-dad presided over a family that leaves the White House healthy and happy.

I'm not black myself, but my sons are.

One of the many American ideals that make no sense at all is that we're all a million rugged individualists marching in lockstep. We dress accordingly, at least the men. If it's always been thus, I yearn for the halcyon days of the man in the gray flannel suit because at least that guy had some flair.

Fashion has underscored the interchangeability of men for a long time, maybe from the outset.

Because the designers at Baby Gap and Crew Cuts have determined it would be cute if kids dressed like their dads, seemingly every American male between 2 and 52 dresses identically.

Men's fashion's tendency toward uniformity promises little fun, but at least it offers this: If I wear sweatpants and sneakers, I can pass as the American it's safest to be.

Years ago, I worked at a fashion magazine. I was the lowest man on the totem pole, one of the only men on that particular pole: a little brother with a dozen older sisters whose grace and glamour I so admired.

Usually, when you see clothes on a model, by some transitive property, that garment is imbued with her beauty.

Children's picture books are a unique record of social evolution: in gender roles and racial politics, as is much discussed, but also in fashion and interior design.

Children's books deal in idealized worlds, so they're a document of how our notion of ideal worlds has changed over time.

Shot glasses make me think of youth and a mode of drinking and living that was never mine, even when I was the age for it.

Every sense has the power to transport us through time, but it's taste I find the most mysterious, and writing about it often results in tortured metaphors.

Every Christmas, I cook an elaborate Mexican dinner.

When we had our first son, four different people gave us the same present: a copy of Ezra Jack Keats' 'The Snowy Day.' A new child often inspires duplicate gifts - we were given a dozen mostly useless baby blankets, just one more thing to spit up on - but this one was different.

Wishing there were more children's books like 'The Snowy Day' is a bit like wishing there were more grownup books like 'Anna Karenina.' There are only so many masterpieces out there.

It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination.

Blackness, any sort of difference, is not a burden. Relegating blackness or other sorts of difference to serious books that explicitly engage with issues creates a context in which it can seem like one.

When you are young, it's deeply annoying to be told that certain things are a condition of your youth. There's almost always some condescension in the proposition that your reality, your hopes, your frustrations, are just a condition of your age, that what feels unique to you is a very common thing after all.

That a friendship ends doesn't mean it was weak from the outset; that it ends says nothing about its importance.

I didn't know, at 22, that everything that happens to you, the good stuff as well as the less-good stuff, accrues and becomes your life.

I didn't know, at 22, that regret is useless. If I could go back and change something - give myself some big break, pass along some secret information, reassure myself that most things would, in fact, work out - I don't think I would.

I know I've had a charmed experience of being a parent, with healthy kids, a helpful partner, access to good day care, and great public schools.

Parenting advice is mostly useless because every family is uniquely its own; artistic advice is mostly useless because every artist works in their own way. Thus, figuring out how to balance the two has an intense specificity.

Kids are the ultimate trump card: a way to get out of co-op board meetings or lunch with a friend you don't want to see or your brother-in-law's set at a comedy club. It's fair to use your kids as an excuse to sidestep what you don't want to do; it's less fair to blame them for not being able to achieve what you do want to do.

Before the arrival of my first son, I gave up on the moribund business of magazine publishing, where I had long dreamed of a career, and went to work in advertising. That I could be paid great money to write was incredibly hard to believe.

Writing takes gall. I like to think that's true even for writers with several books under their belt, writers who have been doing it for years. It takes something - guts, gumption, self-delusion - to ask for a reader's time when we all know there's nothing new under the sun; that it's all been said, or written, before.

I always like it when writers posit writing as an act of empathy. It's such a grand turn of phrase, such a noble ideal; empathy is so worth aiming for in life that the same must hold true in art. But personally, I can't think too deeply about that when I'm working, or I'd never get anything down on the page.

The cultural conversation around privilege has grown vibrant enough that the ultimate privilege is to just ignore it altogether. Some decry this conversation as pernicious. I don't agree.

If writing really is empathy, then understanding your place in society might actually help you achieve it.

I'm a square. I always wanted the standard-issue American dream: beautiful home, loving husband, couple of kids. I met another square, and we got married; a year later, we had a baby; three years later, had another.

We have all come from a woman in some fashion.

Subtlety doesn't work with kids.

For a long time, I thought that I was an enlightened parent by virtue of being an enlightened person. What a fool.

The culture looms much larger than you do as a parent, and one can hardly rely on the culture to impart the lesson that womanhood is valuable.

Children are weird. I was going to say 'most children,' but I think this a rare universal law.

Children's literature - the product of adult guesswork - often fails to account for its audience's slippery grasp on the world.

Truly smart people and truly smart dressers share one thing in common: They make it look easy.

With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women.

Parenting is love, sure, but it's as much about receiving love as it is giving it. Parenthood is a kind of vanity.

Vanity is a sensitive subject for gay men.

I don't want the staggeringly wealthy Elton John and his family to represent the standard of gay fatherhood any more than straight people want the stunningly beautiful Angelina Jolie and her family to represent the standard of heterosexual parenthood. Stars are outliers; stars are exceptions.

Is deciding what you like an instinct, a sense that arrives as swiftly as my autoimmune response to cat dander? Or is it the result of reasoned consideration, the way wine tasters swish pinot noir around in their mouths, spit it out, and reach for complex metaphors about chocolate and tobacco?

Everyone on Twitter - everyone on the Internet - seems so damn certain. Brevity doesn't allow for nuance, and it's a nice complement to confidence.

I am not anti-Internet, and I don't think smart phones are a social ill.

Checking your phone during dinner is no less rude than reading 'People' during dinner, which I once saw a woman do at Blue Ribbon Brooklyn as she dined with her husband/boyfriend/whatever.

I reject the notion that one should feel guilty about what you don't know.

I work when I work, and that is often dictated by the things I cannot control.

Nothing is ever ideal. You have to work all the same.

Writer's block is a fiction.

Summer is meant to be for travel, for exploration, for leisure, but sometimes budgets and schedules dictate otherwise.

Lindsay Hatton's novel 'Monterey Bay' so beautifully evokes the landscape of the titular locale, you'll feel transported to Northern California even if you're reading it on the bus on your morning commute.

I work when I'm alone, but I have children and a family and a job, so alone time is at a premium.

I grew up in the D.C. suburbs, and what I like about that place is that there's not a strong regional affect in the cultural imagination like there is in Dallas or San Francisco or New York City. You have a little more freedom as a novelist this way. The suburbs become a generic idea, and the place doesn't intrude into the narrative.

You can't control what's going to happen to the book you're about to publish.

I think that in the cultural imagination, motherhood has a primacy that fatherhood just doesn't; and that's not to say that there aren't many fathers who are active and engaged and for whom that is their life's passion. But somehow, in the imagination, there's something different about maternity.

This tension between ambition and parenthood, that's not a reckoning that many men face. There are plenty of men who say, 'Oh, I need to be there for my kids, and I can't do x or y professionally,' but for the most part, that's a struggle that belongs to women in society.

Fiction is just lying.

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