I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings Bar Mitzvahs funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.

My parents were both very intellectually honest straightforward and for them faith meant that you were fully engaged.

The marriage of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution honored in all cultures and by every religious faith. It's in this institution that children are meant to be nurtured. We know this after thousands of years of human experience.

I realized that my truest passion was for helping people change through faith in a higher power. That meant for me belonging to the church. Using my abilities to bring Christian doctrine to a postmodern world.

We decided to try in vitro because both Peter and I felt we couldn't handle another failure. When I miscarried after that we had to come to terms with the possibility that this wasn't meant to be.

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for after all habit is relative to a stereotyped world and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons things situations seem alike.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

I had decided I wanted to write about food and I knew the only way to do that is to speak with authority which meant learning the language and knowing what that experience is like.

While I was trying to save money to go to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Australia I ended up getting all of this experience which meant that by the time I had enough money in the bank to go to school I didn't really need to go to school anymore.

The perfection of our union especially our commitment to equality of opportunity has been a story of constant striving to live up to our Founding principles. This is what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said 'In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.'