Quotes from Sandra Tsing Loh

The paradox is, I can't miss the good things about my father while he is alive, but I will of course miss him... when he is dead.

The problem is that, partly because we are women, a large measure of our happiness depends on our relationships - including, unavoidably, our relationships with men.

I am stricken with the peculiar curse of being a 21st-century woman who makes more than the man she's living with - first with a husband for 13 years and now with a new partner.

The literature of menopause is the saddest, the most awful, and the most medical of all genres. You're sleepless, you're anxious, you're fat, you're depressed - and the advice is always the same: take more walks, eat some kale, and drink lots of water. It didn't help.

With more women in power, the world would be better off.

I admit to a bias toward high culture.

I find I'm the sort of harried working mother who has difficulty scheduling in a bit of rest amid the Ptolemaically complicated interlocking gears of professional and personal life.

In Los Angeles, we've seen a phenomenon where a school will go from one that no one will go to, to within three years becoming the 'hot' school. I've seen this over and over again.

I will never do Pilates. I walk.

I think private school is much better at customer service and making the parents feel better, especially in Los Angeles. It's almost like a spa for the parents where you drop your kids off, where they give you a beautifully baked thing and let the parents write their own newsletter about global warming.

Approaching 50, I am living a life that is less sunlit Waldman/Chabon than tattered Charles Bukowski.

I am a member of the 'sandwich' generation, that group that must simultaneously care for elderly parents and support children.

Very, very few adults possess so much charm that they can long be supported by another adult based on that attribute alone.

The very success of the modern American family - where kids get punctually to SAT-tutoring classes, the mortgage gets paid, the second-story remodel stays on budget - surely depends on spouses' not being in love.

I agree that mommy wars are not good for any mothers: that such wars are time and effort wasted.

Just because marriage didn't work for us doesn't mean we don't believe in the institution. Just because our own marital track records are mixed doesn't mean our hearts don't lift at the sight of our daughters' Tiffany-blue wedding invitations.

In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

I think of the friends of mine who were blissfully single in their 20s and 30s. Still single in their 40s and 50s, they seem to be contracting a bit.

Our entire personality, our energy level, and how we cope is hormonal.

When I think of Chinese parents, I think of people who weep upon hearing Beethoven, but who can't necessarily bring that joy to others.

If I was going to pretend to be the supermom next door, it would've been counterfeit and a lie. I figured I had to write something out of a new place.

I am shamed to realize that in my marriage, my daughters never heard their father and me fight, which also meant, perhaps, that we didn't truly communicate.

Life at the top may be privileged, but it is not simple.

In my case, when it arrived at 49, perimenopause was terrifying and like nothing I had ever before physically experienced.