My earliest memories of going to Fenway with my father are a blur: many games, me too young to care, but aware that our team 'stunk.' In those years, the 1960s, the Red Sox baseball card I always coveted most was not Carl Yastrzemski's but the far more ordinary Felix Mantilla's.

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

What's important about me is that I really have, in ways I never could have foreseen when I was young, a writing career that's reached a lot of different places.

When I see a blatant injustice, I can't keep quiet. I've been that way since I was a little kid.

It sounds kind of cliche when teams say, 'Us against the world,' but that's the mentality you have to have. There are so many opinions out there that come from media, that come from your family or come from people on TV.

During 1989, my mother, who was exceedingly good at finding these free programs - you know, we were on welfare, just trying to get through - but she would find these amazing programs. She sent me to the Soviet Union at the age of 12 to go study in the forest of then-Leningrad with 50 other Soviet kids.

Forgiveness is important in families, especially when there are so many secrets that need to be healed - for the most part, every family's got them.

The Lord protects, guides, and watches over those who are His trusted friends in His work. His work and that of His Father and our Father is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of the children of God. And Satan, the enemy of our happiness, opposes those who serve the Lord.