Catherine Gigante-Brown

Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions wasn't your typical cutesie baby fare. It was raw, real—and unabashedly funny.

Content Notice: Death

To the tattoo artist, I was a flesh canvas that she could transform into something beautiful.

Candida Royalle pretty much invented couples erotica. She made it socially-acceptable. Respectable. The women in her films looked like real women and had real, comfortable female bodies. And her movies actually had stories. Good stories. She hired her friends—adult legends like Annie Sprinkle, Veronicas Hart and Vera, and Gloria Leonard — to create Femme films too.

Why do we venerate individuality in adults but condemn it in children?

That’s the thing about being a breast cancer survivor — it’s always there: it never goes away. The scars, the fear that lurks in the back of your mind like a boogeyman. You’re going along nicely, living your merry life, and you’re fine, until you’re not.

Being a little bit chubby is better than being a lot dead.

You learn a lot about people when you live in their home. The Taylors seemed to lead a joyless, Spartan existence.

I try. I really do. But whenever I attempt to embrace my husband Peter’s Cuban culture, I always screw up.

I immediately developed a hot-and-heavy girlcrush on the wild, wacky, brash, candid, feminist, rubber-faced comedian—and you should too.