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" I married the man I love when the state of California said I could. We made a family through adoption, as New York State said we could. From the outside, our family - two dads, two sons via adoption - seems like an experiment, but what family isn't an experiment? "

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" I know I've had a charmed experience of being a parent, with healthy kids, a helpful partner, access to good day care, and great public schools. "

Rumaan Alam

Good

Great

Good Day

" It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination. "

" Every sense has the power to transport us through time, but it's taste I find the most mysterious, and writing about it often results in tortured metaphors. "

Rumaan Alam

Power

Time

" Men's fashion's tendency toward uniformity promises little fun, but at least it offers this: If I wear sweatpants and sneakers, I can pass as the American it's safest to be. "

" Lindsay Hatton's novel 'Monterey Bay' so beautifully evokes the landscape of the titular locale, you'll feel transported to Northern California even if you're reading it on the bus on your morning commute. "

" I don't have a Winslow Homer or a Renoir, but I do have the liberty to live as I like. "

Rumaan Alam

Liberty

Live

" Some writers are prolific; some are shape-shifters. It's rare and intimidating to encounter one who is both. "

" Checking your phone during dinner is no less rude than reading 'People' during dinner, which I once saw a woman do at Blue Ribbon Brooklyn as she dined with her husband/boyfriend/whatever. "

" Blackness, any sort of difference, is not a burden. Relegating blackness or other sorts of difference to serious books that explicitly engage with issues creates a context in which it can seem like one. "

Rumaan Alam

Difference

Burden

" I am not anti-Internet, and I don't think smart phones are a social ill. "

Rumaan Alam

Think

Social

" When you are what we call a 'minority writer,' a writer of color, a writer of any kind of difference, there is some kind of presumption of autobiography in everything you produce. And I find that really maddening, and I resist that. "

" I do think that I have a sensitivity to the depictions of maybe all minorities in literature. And I think that the experience of people who look like me is so rarely captured in big, mainstream American fiction that you tend to sort of empathize with any character of color who pops up. "

" When we had our first son, four different people gave us the same present: a copy of Ezra Jack Keats' 'The Snowy Day.' A new child often inspires duplicate gifts - we were given a dozen mostly useless baby blankets, just one more thing to spit up on - but this one was different. "

" I work when I'm alone, but I have children and a family and a job, so alone time is at a premium. "

" Wishing there were more children's books like 'The Snowy Day' is a bit like wishing there were more grownup books like 'Anna Karenina.' There are only so many masterpieces out there. "

Rumaan Alam

Children

Day

" The cultural conversation around privilege has grown vibrant enough that the ultimate privilege is to just ignore it altogether. Some decry this conversation as pernicious. I don't agree. "

" Before the arrival of my first son, I gave up on the moribund business of magazine publishing, where I had long dreamed of a career, and went to work in advertising. That I could be paid great money to write was incredibly hard to believe. "

" When I look at the list of my favorite works, writers who are women do tend to outnumber writers who are men for whatever reason. "

" Class is very, very fertile territory for American artists, and it has been for a long time. "

" Shot glasses make me think of youth and a mode of drinking and living that was never mine, even when I was the age for it. "

" I didn't know, at 22, that everything that happens to you, the good stuff as well as the less-good stuff, accrues and becomes your life. "

" Obama-as-dad is my favorite Obama. Obama-as-executive, with his stubborn faith in reasonableness in times absent of reason, presided over the country during its descent into madness. I find it a comfort that Obama-as-dad presided over a family that leaves the White House healthy and happy. "

" Time is a finite resource. "

" Kids are the ultimate trump card: a way to get out of co-op board meetings or lunch with a friend you don't want to see or your brother-in-law's set at a comedy club. It's fair to use your kids as an excuse to sidestep what you don't want to do; it's less fair to blame them for not being able to achieve what you do want to do. "

" We have all come from a woman in some fashion. "

" It comforts the adult conscience to remember that, amid history's grave injustices, there were still great lives. "

" When you are young, it's deeply annoying to be told that certain things are a condition of your youth. There's almost always some condescension in the proposition that your reality, your hopes, your frustrations, are just a condition of your age, that what feels unique to you is a very common thing after all. "

" I work when I work, and that is often dictated by the things I cannot control. "

" Shopping for clothes is time consuming, it's tiring, and it can feel like a waste of an autumn afternoon. "

" Parenting advice is mostly useless because every family is uniquely its own; artistic advice is mostly useless because every artist works in their own way. Thus, figuring out how to balance the two has an intense specificity. "