If you had asked me what I wanted when I was 12 years old, I probably would have said, 'To marry a plastic surgeon.' You can hardly blame me: I was growing up in Miami.

French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.

Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them.

Practically every time I speak up at a school conference, a political event, or my apartment building association's annual meeting, I'm met with a display of someone else's superior intelligence.

I don't think that writing talent has much to do with where one went to school, or the number of degrees on one's business card, but I do get a bit bristly at the implication that romance authors couldn't possibly be smart enough to get into an Ivy League school.

Truth is, I love to play bartender and assist my husband at the BBQ.

If you ask any couple who have been married 50 years or longer, they will tell you they've experienced it all. The same is true of the Beach Boys.

I've been in relationships where we've said 'I love you' after two weeks.