My children used to think that it was exciting to get up at 4 a.m. and go out shopping on so-called, “Black Friday,” the day apparently consecrated to holiday sales. Then, one of my daughters saw a stampede at an electronics store in which a woman’s leg was broken – and that put a stop…

Men think they are attractive because they are powerful. Or smart. Or fit. Let me tell you a secret. I know the truth about what women find most attractive in a man – and it’s not money and it’s not a title. I once asked one of my daughters, what would a woman do for…

As I finished work on my most recent novel (Here, Below the Surface, to debut in 2023), I realized that I had somehow incorporated (yet again) a plot point that reflects my obsession with women changing their names when they marry.  I’ve thought about this since I first married and was told, by the school…

If you want to really know someone, follow him home. That was the reasoning behind Stephanie’s Halloween assignment for the correspondents of American Eye, the Chicago-based TV magazine where I worked right out of college.  “The greats,” said our producer. “We’re going to take our viewers home, to the very places where the greats created…

The reason that I buy things off eBay is not just because they’re less expensive. Or rather, not only because they’re less expensive, but because: There is only one item, like it or not It’s mailed to you You don’t have to experience a fitting room I don’t shop.  Some of the worst experiences of…

I am one of those people.  Cat owners know me on sight. They feel my loathing. Cats, of course, are cunning … and they know me right away, as well. They make a big pretense of sliding up to me and entwining their snakey selves around my legs or shoulders so that I will haplessly…

Except that it is a serious surgery that comes with certain dangers and leaves scars, I would happily have liposuction all over my body rather than trying to lose 20 pounds sensibly and slowly with diet and exercise. Who cares about slowness and common sense? I want to see my knees without the little shoulder…

Sometime before 1960, at Disneyland in California, a restaurant called Casa de Fritos bought stale tortilla chips from a local vendor and spiced them up for a second life. They became so popular that Frito-Lay eventually bought them and “Doritos” were born. Doritos are the food equivalent of crack.  They don’t really taste good. They…

Was Sisyphus a happy man? In a 1940s essay called The Myth of Sisyphus, author Albert Camus considered the case of a guy condemned by the gods (oh those gods, peppy as all get-out!) to roll a boulder up a hill to the very top – only to have the boulder roll back down to…

It’s almost my 25th anniversary. For all these years, through many up’s and some harrowingly steep down’s, the marriage everyone thought would fail, has endured. When we got married, my husband and I had known each other two months. I was widowed: He’d never even come close to being engaged. I was older. He never…