It Is So Easy To Waste Our

Being A Parent Is Not Transaction ... We Do Not Get What We Give. It Is The Ultimate Pay-it-forward Endeavor: We Are Good Parents Not So They Will Be Loving Enough To Stay With Us But So They Will Be Strong Enough To Leave Us.

For Most Of My Adult Life, I Have Been An Emotional Hit-and- Run Driver--that Is, A Reporter. I Made People Like Me, Trust Me, Open Their Hearts And Their Minds To Me, And Cry And Bleed On To The Pages Of My Neat Little Notebooks, And Then I Went Back To A Safe Place And Made A Story Out Of It.

I Don't Do Research For My Novels. Obviously, In My Other Line Of Work As A Reporter And A Columnist, I've Had The Opportunity To Get To Know Both Social Workers And Tv Talk-show Hosts.

My Sister Is A Public School Teacher. She Makes Far Far Less Money Than I Do, And Gets Almost No Public Attention For Her Work. Yet I Believe What She Does Is Infinitely More Important And More Difficult Than What I Do.

That's Really What I Want In A Leader; I Want Somebody Who's Really, Really Smart.