From essays:

You are writing the story of your only life every single minute of every day.

–Katherine Center, What I Would Tell Her (Mom 2.0 Video)

“Nothing that doesn’t push you past your limits can change your life. It’s true of work, it’s true of parenting, and it’s true — a hundred times over — of love.”

–Katherine Center, Nothing Worthwhile is Ever Easy

There is an entire universe of things my mother knows that I don’t.

–Katherine Center, Things To Remember Not to Forget

We all carry our mothers inside us.

–Katherine Center, Things to Remember Not to Forget

Maybe the past is supposed to fade—and that’s actually a kindness of human memory.

–Katherine Center, Things to Remember Not to Forget

You can’t know what you know now and feel the way you did then.

–Katherine Center, Things to Remember Not to Forget

That’s what just hit me:  How you really can’t have everything.  You have to give up the old to get the new.  You can’t be the child and the mom at the same time.  You can’t be your young self and your old self at the same time.  You can’t know what you know now and feel the way you did then.  You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.

–Katherine Center, Things to Remember Not to Forget

Our lives disappear, even as we live them.

—Katherine Center

We build our lives in moments, and even the ones we can’t remember become the story of who we are.

—Katherine Center

The human race has a lot to answer for, and it’s not as easy to feel hopeful as it should be—but you make it more important to try.

—Katherine Center

The way that I love you makes me a better person.

—Katherine Center

The way that I love you makes me a better person, and the way that you love me back makes every sorrow worth it.

—Katherine Center

Don’t let anyone convince you that love doesn’t matter.

—Katherine Center

We are at our finest when we take care of each other.

—Katherine Center

And so my hope for you, good boy, as you grow taller every day, is that you will learn to take good care of yourself, and you will learn to take good care of others—and, someday, you’ll see how those two things are exactly the same.

—Katherine Center

It’s so easy to think that your strengths don’t matter.

—Katherine Center

Look for beauty in everything.

—Katherine Center

The best things about womanhood might possibly even be the conversations.  The chatting.  The gabbing. The whispering.  The hands-on-hips eye-rolling.  The yukking-it up.

–Katherine Center,  Kirtsy Video

We’re looking for stories that speak to us.  We’re looking for stories that connect us with something true.  But, instead, a lot of the time we get strippers.  All I’m saying is, when boys are writing the stories, the percentage of strippers is bound to go up.  And real stories about real women kinda don’t get written at all.

–Katherine Center,  Kirtsy Video

And despite everything I know now, I still believe, as I did when I was little, that there is an entire universe of things that my mother knows that I don’t.  I still believe that nothing truly bad can ever happen if my mother is around.  I know it’s not true.  But still.  It is true.

–Katherine Center, Things to Remember Not to Forget

I worry constantly about carpool and whether or not I’ve forgotten a carload of weeping children at the school gate.  How on earth does anyone do it?  How did she make it look so easy?  Or maybe time makes everything seem easy.  Or maybe I am really terrified that I’ll never become enough like her to keep her with me. I know that we all carry our mothers inside us.  But somehow that doesn’t seem like enough.

–Katherine Center, Things to Remember Not to Forget

From various interviews:

I guess that’s the upside of not being young anymore . . .   You know from experience that the struggle always leads, in some way, to something better.

–Katherine Center

I like to write about people who are real and likeable.  I like to write about people who tell their stories in that close and intimate voice we use with best friends. I love the closeness and honesty and vulnerability that come from characters who can talk that way.

–Katherine Center

All my main characters are people I’d love to sit around having coffee with. They are people who will tell you honestly about the things that scare them and worry them and trouble them.  Because those moments of connection between women–when they really decide to be honest with each other about their lives–are some of the best things in life.

–Katherine Center

Some of the greatest ideas we have come from making do.

–Katherine Center

What matters most is how you respond to your heartbreaks and your disappointments and your fears.  What matters most is who you become in response to them.

–Katherine Center

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

–Katherine Center

Success is doing the right thing for who you are.

–Katherine Center

My goal is to try to be as happy as I can — going through every day just as it is.

–Katherine Center

If you feel lucky, then you are.

–Katherine Center

Look for the good stuff.

–Katherine Center

You don’t have to be perfect to be awesome.

–Katherine Center

From Novels:

People are always beautiful when you love them.

–Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful

In fiction, you can be as true as you want.  Real life is a different story.

–Katherine Center, interview

Sometimes there is no way to hold your life together. Sometimes things just have to fall apart.

–Katherine Center, Get Lucky

There is no tenderness without bravery.

–Katherine Center, Get Lucky

It’s vital to learn how to make the best of things.

–Katherine Center, Get Lucky

Beauty comes from tenderness.

–Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful

It’s always better to have what you have than to get what you wanted.

–Katherine Center, Get Lucky

I suddenly understood what it was, exactly, people longed for when they longed for their youth.

–Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful

The eyes see everything through the heart.

–Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful

When you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you.

–Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful

It’s more important to be interesting, to be vivid, and to be adventurous than to sit pretty for pictures.

–Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful

“Here’s what I tell myself now. That it’s vital to learn how to make the best of things. That there is no tenderness without bravery. That if things hadn’t been so bad they could never have gotten so good. And that it’s always better to have what you have than to get what you wanted. Except for this: Every now and then, when you are impossibly lucky you rise above yourself-and get both.”

–Katherine Center, Get Lucky

I believe women are too hard on themselves. I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you. I believe the eyes see everything through the heart–and nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love.

–Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful

Laughter is beautiful. Kindness is beautiful. Cellulite is beautiful. Softness and plumpness and roundness are beautiful. It’s more important to be interesting, to be vivid, and to be adventurous than to sit for pictures. A woman’s soft tummy is a miracle of nature. Beauty comes from tenderness. Beauty comes from variety, from specificity, from the fact that no person in the world looks exactly like anyone else. Beauty comes from the tragedy that each person’s life is destined to be lost to time. I believe women are too hard on themselves. I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you. I believe the eyes see everything through the heart–and nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love. I have trained my eyes to look for beauty, and I’ve gotten very good at finding it.

–Katherine Center, Everyone Is Beautiful

Text from the Mom 2.o Video:

What I Would Tell Her (If I Knew What To Say)

You are a miracle.

And I have to love you this fiercely:  So that you can feel it even after you leave for school, or even while you are asleep, or even after your childhood becomes a memory.

You’ll forget all this when you grow up.  But it’s okay.

Being a mother means having your heart broken.

And it means loving and losing and falling apart and coming back together.

And it’s the best there is.  And also, sometimes, the worst.

Sometimes you won’t have anyone to talk to.

Sometimes you’ll wonder if you’ve forgotten who you are.

But you must remember this:  What you’re doing matters.

And you have to be brave with your life so that others can be brave with theirs.

The truth is, being a woman is a gift.

Tenderness is a gift.

Intimacy is a gift.

And nurturing the good in this world is a nothing short of a privilege.

That’s why I have to love you this way.  So I can give what I have to you.  So that you can carry it in your body and pass it on.

I have watched you sleep.  I’ve kissed you a million times.  And I know something that you don’t, yet:

You are writing the story of your ONLY life every single minute of every day.

And my greatest hope for you, sweet child, is that I can teach you how to write a good one.

It’s a book of gorgeous, sumptuous pictures by the photographer Peter Freed that aims to redefine what it means to be a woman in her prime.

From the PRIME website:

The idea of the book is to pair the photos with the voices of the women in them.  Here is my essay:

The Prime Book is not out yet, but you can LIKE their Facebook page to get a notification when it is!

We had a FANTASTIC crowd at the launch for The Lost Husband this week!  It felt like there were a thousand people there, which can’t be right.  But it was standing-room-only, and Brazos Bookstore sold out of books.

I am so grateful to all the people who came to cheer this book on.  And I’m grateful, too, to TARGET for choosing it as a featured book and  USA Today for calling it “heartwarming.”

And so, so grateful to PEOPLE Magazine for giving it a beautiful review!

It’s always a bit of a naked feeling putting out a new book.  You’ve worked so long and so quietly–and then, suddenly, it’s out there, and reviews are popping up everywhere . . . That’s part of the fun, of course–because it’s gratifying to share the stories with readers at last.  But it’s a little nervewracking, too.

I wish I could send everybody who came to the launch–or who’s given it a good review, or who’s Facebooked about how much they loved it–a heartfelt, handwritten thank-you note on gorgeous linen stationery to tell them how grateful I am.

As it is, I’ll just have to hope that somehow they already know.

I’d been looking online for something cheery for our kitchen, but I hadn’t found anything.  And I was getting impatient, because I kept glancing at the bare wall where a clock should have been.

This one seemed fine.  And cheap!  And kinda retro.

And while I was there, I grabbed these napkins.  Just because I thought they were pretty.

And then it hit me that the napkins might look nice on the clock!

So I grabbed my scissors, and some Mod Podge, and I cut little petals out of the napkins and glued the petals around in a scallopy border.

But then the clockface itself looked a little plain.  A little sad.

So I decoupaged a few flowers in the middle.  And painted a few highlights.

Now we just need to figure out how to hang it so it doesn’t fall off the wall when the back door slams (like our last 3 kitchen wall clocks have).

I loved making this clock!  The cutting!  The pasting!  The sense of anticipation!  I had the song “La Vie En Rose” going through my head the whole time.  Especially my favorite line:  ”Everyday words seem to turn into love songs.”

That’s something I need to remind myself next time I feel sad.  I am always happy when I’m making things.

What does “success” mean in Katherine Center´s world?

Success is doing the right thing for who you are.  It’s living a life that matches and supports you.

Do you feel you´ve made it as an author? As a woman? As a mom? What do you feel (if anything) you still need to do in life?

I always try to be careful with my definitions of success—because if success is too far out on the horizon, you’ll never get there.  Our culture often defines success with things like big mansions.  But I don’t think that’s right.  I think the stress of getting those things cancels out the pleasures.

My goal is to try to be as happy as I can going through every day just as it is.

Do I get to do work that I love and that makes me feel proud?  Every day.   Do I have amazing kids who crack me up?  Yep!  Does my husband have a fantastic mustache?  Yes, he does!  That’s how I think about success: using internal measures more than external ones.  I know who I am and what matters to me, and I stay close to those things.  I have people in my life who make me laugh all the time.  I get to do the work I love.  It’s better than I ever could have hoped for.

But it’s not perfect.  The cat wakes me up in the middle of the night. Our upstairs bathub overflowed and now there’s a water stain on the living room ceiling.  I never have enough hours in the day.  It’s a normal life with ups and downs.  But it’s the perfect life for me.

What did you feel when you saw (and felt) your first book in print? Do you get the same feeling with every book since?

Seeing my first book in print was bliss.  It blew my mind.  I didn’t even know what to do with all the excitement.  We found a box from the publisher on the doorstep one evening, and I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning reading!  I was like, “This thing’s a page-turner!”

It’s not exactly the same feeling with later books. It’s a good feeling—a very good one—like, “Oh, hello, little book!  I’ve been waiting to see you!”  But it’s not quite as mind-blowing once you’ve done it before.  Because after the first one, it’s not a surprise anymore.  But it’s still totally awesome.

What would you tell aspiring authors who do not believe they can make it? And what would you tell those who believe it is all a question of luck?

I would say that if you like to write stories and you’re finding a way to do that in your life, then you’ve already made it.  And it took me a long time to figure that out.  Just write them.  Write them and show them to your mom or your best friend.  Write them, and put together a writing group to read each other’s work.  Publishing, marketing—those things have their charms.  But they cannot touch the joy of just bringing the stories to life on the page.  That’s what makes everything worth it.

As for the question of luck, I often think luck is all about how you see things.  If you feel lucky, then you are.  I’m not trying to be coy about this.  The vast majority of people never get rich or famous off their writing.  But what they do get, if they really do love to write, is the euphoria that comes from telling the stories themselves.

Why do you write? (Ha, not very original of course) Do you see yourself ever NOT writing?

I write because I love it.  I write because doing it gives me a crazy thrill.  On days that I’ve written something, I walk around with butterflies.  I keep hearing this quote about how writers don’t like to write—they like to have written.  But I completely disagree.  The writing is the one thing about being a writer that’s pure joy.  Other things—the selling, the marketing, the schmoozing—come and go.  They can either make you happy or miserable, depending on the day.  But the writing should be a constant source of pleasure.  And if it’s not, then don’t do it.  Do something that is!

What was your toughest hurdle in life and how did you overcome it?

Seventh grade was the toughest, I think.  Though it’s a tough call.  But that year, my grandmother, who was like a second mom, died.  And my parents got divorced about 6 weeks later.  And my two best friends found other best friends right around that time.  I felt really alone, and I didn’t know who I was or how to live a good life, and let’s just say puberty was kicking me up and down the block.  So I started a journal.  And when I filled it up, I started another.  And did that for ten solid years—all the way through college.  It’s where I learned how to write.

Do you ever reread your books? Why or why not? Why should women read them?

I do re-read them!  Sometimes I’ll be looking for a passage, and I’ll just get caught up in it and have to go to the end.  Or sometimes I’ll hear a comment or read a review that makes me want to go back and take another look.  It is fun to go back and read them.

And why should women read them?  Well, they’re kind of heroine’s journeys.  They’re comic and bittersweet stories of women learning to rise above circumstances and become the best versions of themselves.  They have authentic, flawed, lovable characters who make mistakes and fumble around.  But the novels have wisdom in them, too.  They use comic situations to look at truths about women’s lives.

Your words of wisdom for other women … (one sentence)

One sentence!  Okay, here’s something I tell myself a lot:  Try to look for the beauty in your life and be as grateful as you can.

*This post originally appeared at Lorraine Ladish’s “Success Diaries” blog.

It was a 1960s handyman’s special kitchen, anyway.  We’d been limping along with it for the ten years that we’ve lived in this house.  Everything worked–except for the things that didn’t–and we found ways to appreciate all its funkiness and quirks.

But then, the leak.  And it was time to start over.  Re-wire the knob-and-tube wiring, put in a new floor, cabinets, lighting–the whole shebang.

We’ve been without a kitchen floor since Thanksgiving, and without a kitchen at all since January–until last week.  I did pretty well with no kitchen at first–and mostly just felt grateful to be building a new kitchen and excited.  But as the months wore on, and our house started to feel more and more like a hovel, I started to feel more and more like the crazy lady IN the hovel.  And as much as my general take on this whole situation is HUGE gratitude that life insisted we put in a brand-new kitchen, I was starting to go a little nuts, there, towards the end.

Now we have the kitchen back–but it’s not the old kitchen.  It’s a brand-new kitchen!  And I am a brand new person!

So.  It’s time to celebrate with a before-and-after post!  (Even though it’s not really after, because there are lots of little things that still have to be fixed.  Who cares?!  We’re close enough!)

Here we go.  Our kitchen BEFORE:

And our kitchen AFTER:

Yep–that’s a Dutch door!  It’s new, but we’re re-using the handle from our awesome-but-decaying original back door.  It’s off being re-nickeled.  And our great contractor is also going make the old lock work so we can use a skeleton key as our back door key.  (!)

Here’s a little built-in hutch.  There was some debate about whether or not the scallops were hokey, but I am obsessively in love with them.  My mom invented those cool c-shaped side pieces there.

And here’s a panoramic view.  The floor is reclaimed hardwoods from an 80-yr-old cottage.  We added shiplap in the breakfast nook.  The light fixture is an antique olive bucket.  The blackboard came out of the school I went to.  (Not kidding, y’all: The were throwing away the historic 1946 slate blackboards–and my awesome mom nabbed one from the dumpster.)

Did I mention my grandfather had a building materials company?  And I love talking about this stuff?

Anyway!  Just wanted to share.  So glad we are almost done–and so glad to have returned to my excited, non-crazy, and unabashedly grateful self.

Chapter 1

My husband had been dead for three years before I started trying to contact him.

By then, our house was long-sold, his suits were donated, and his wedding ring was in a safety deposit box.  All I kept with me was a shoebox full of meaningless stuff: a button from a shirt, an old grocery list, his driver’s license, his car keys, a doodle he’d drawn on a post-it.  That was everything of Danny’s I held onto: a box of junk.

That, and, of course, his children.

Piece by piece, I had left our old life behind—though I suppose you could argue that it had left me first—and now I was in the final stages of starting over, which meant, for my little lopsided family, leaving town.  And so on this Texas-warm New Year’s Eve morning, I was following a ribbon of asphalt out to the countryside, checking and re-checking my directions while my kids poked each other with magic wands in the back seat of our minivan.

“Hey!” I said, catching their eyes in the rearview mirror.  “Those are for spell-casting only.  No poking!  Or else.”

This was about the tenth time I’d threatened to confiscate the wands.  Weak parenting, I knew.  I should have taken them away ten exits back—no second chances.  But I didn’t want to have to take them away and go through all the drama that would follow.  I wanted the threat to be enough.

We were approaching the town square of Atwater, Texas.  A town two hours from Houston at the edge of the Hill Country that I’d never visited or even thought much about.  The speed limit downshifted as we drew closer, and the rolling fields that had surrounded us since we left the interstate now gave way to barn-sized feed stores, cinder-block motels, and fast-food joints.  I glanced down to review my next step:  go around the courthouse—then a right on FM 2237, known to locals, apparently, as Broken Tree Road.

We were beginning, I kept telling the kids in a voice that sounded false even to me, “an adventure.”  Though the truth is, moving to Atwater was much less about starting something than ending something.  Because there were many hardships that followed my husband’s death—finding out he’d spent our savings, for example, and cashed in his life insurance—but the hardest hardship by far, one year after his funeral, was having to move in with my mother.

Since then, we had stayed at her condo for two passive-aggressive years, as I endured judgments on my parenting, my figure, my wrinkles, my grieving process, my haircut, and my “joi de vivre” with no end in sight until, at last, unexpectedly, I’d received a letter from my mother’s famously crazy sister offering me a job and a place to stay.  On her goat farm.  In Atwater.  Somewhere southeast of San Antonio.

Now, less than a week later, we were trading one kind of crazy for another–hoping against hope it was an upgrade.

And so the morning’s drive from Houston was not just the pavement between towns.  It was the shift between our old life and our new one.  All morning, I’d felt it—the big-dealness of it—as a nervous flutter in my chest, and I was sitting straight up in the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel with both hands like a student driver at attention.

Or, as at attention as you can be with two children bapping each other in the back seat with wands.  Because just as the road brought us to a stop sign at the town square, and just as I caught my breath at the county courthouse rising up in front of us like a Disney Castle, my son Tank smacked his sister Abby once again on the head with his wand, and when she shrieked, I hit the brakes and turned full around to face them.

“Quit it!” I said, giving them my sternest look.  “The next time I have to say it, I’m throwing the wands out the window.”

They bowed their heads a little and held still.

“Got it?” I asked, and they both nodded.

Just as I was turning back around, I heard a man on the sidewalk shout a desperate “Hey! Watch out!”

I looked up, but it wasn’t me he was calling to.  It was someone in the crosswalk in front of us—and, at the same moment I realized that, I also realized my car was not exactly stopped.  Turning all the way around in my seat had eased my foot off the brake, and we were rolling forward.

I stamped my foot back down in time to see a girl standing in the crosswalk, directly in front of my car.  She had turned her head at the shout, too, and thrown her hands out toward the hood as if they could protect her, just as we lurched to a stop, tires squeaking, less than two inches from her knees.  She looked straight through my windshield and we locked eyes for longer than I’d ever held a gaze before.

I threw the transmission into park, but before I was even out of the car, the man who had shouted at us appeared in the crosswalk and grabbed the girl by the shoulders.  And that’s all I saw as I leapt from the driver’s seat and arrived beside them: her dazed face and a white-haired guy with a mermaid tattoo on his forearm.

The tattooed guy was shouting.  “Jesus, Sunshine!  Watch where you’re going!”

But she waved him away.  “I’m okay,” she said.  “I’m fine.”

Then he turned to me.  “You almost killed her!”

I was out of breath.  “I’m sorry!  I thought my brakes were on!  My kids were fighting! I’ve been up since five!”

“Killed By A Minivan,” this girl Sunshine said, as if she were reading the headline.  “That’s not how I’d prefer to go.”

“No,” I said.  “Of course not.”

“Killed By An Ice Cream Truck, maybe,” she shrugged, as if that suggestion were less bad.  “Or Killed By A Jet Ski.” She looked down at the stripes on the pavement.  “Maybe a paragliding accident.”

My kids were back at it in the car as if nothing had happened.  I could sense the wands in motion and hear squeals.  Cars were lining up behind me.  I was just about to excuse myself when she snapped her fingers, met my eyes, and pointed right at me.

“Shark Attack!” she said.

It felt odd to brainstorm the best headline for this girl’s death.  But it also seemed like it would have been rude to deny her anything she wanted.  So I faked it:  “Yes!”  Then I nodded. “So much better than a minivan.”

But she could tell I was faking.  She let her hand drop and then she stuffed it in her pocket.

“I’m so sorry,” I said again.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

That’s when I realized the tattooed guy was studying me.  “Are you who I think you are?” he asked.

“Um,” I said.  “Who do you think I am?”

“Are you Jeannie’s niece?”

It was so odd for him to know that.  And I had never in my life heard my aunt called “Jeannie,” much less with such affection.  But he had me.  “Yes,” I said.  “That’s me.”

And then he did the strangest thing.  He stepped over and hugged me.  Tight.  A big hey-howdy Texas hug.  “Welcome to Atwater,” he said, when he finally let go.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say.  Sunshine was turning to leave.  We’d been in the road too long.

Just at that moment, the truck behind us got tired of waiting.  He honked—loudly.  The sound startled us all—and something about it woke Sunshine up.  She turned back and seemed to see me for the first time—seemed almost to recognize me, even.  She stepped back my direction, took my hand for a second, and ran her eyes over my face.

“That husband you lost?” she said then, out of nowhere. “I can find him for you.”

Here’s Katherine telling the quick story of how she wrote her first novel:

“There wasn’t a dull spot in this book–just a really great story about finding home and yourself . . .  It’s really one of the best women’s fiction books I’ve read.”  –Lisa

“. . . a delightful, heartwarming read, and I highly recommend it.”  -Viki

“. . . Uplifting without sugar-coating the complexities of life.” –Jocelyn

“. . . A quick, feel-good read that you can pass on to friends and family knowing that you’re spreading around a little bright spot of happy.” –Stacey

“This compelling story about moving on and self-discovery was just amazing. ”  –Amber

“An original and compusively readable story.”  –Meg

“You won’t be able to put it down, and, long after you have, it will still be on your mind.”  –Tonya

“Beautiful story of reinvention and reclaiming one’s life after loss.”  –Carrie

“A book about love and loss and finding out who you are all over again . . .”  – Rachel

“Highly recommended if you’re looking for a good book to get involved in.”  –BeautifulSunshine