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I want to get married. I want a family. I want to create a home with someone. A shared answering machine message. Holidays together. A witness for life.

Some women are embarrassed to admit this out loud, as if wanting to these things were bad or wrong or weak. I'm not ashamed. In fact, when asked, “Are you married?” on the publicity Q&A for Dutton, I wrote, "No, but I want to be," followed by a smiley face.

My boyfriend and I broke up two months ago. We had been together for almost five years. I still love him and always will, but we couldn’t negotiate a life together.

Don’t worry, this isn’t like Harry Potter, I’m not spoiling anything. If you read my book, which I hope you do, you might wonder if I end up with the guy in the end, but the book isn’t about ending up with the guy in the end. It’s about letting go of past hurt and guilt, letting go of your anxiety about the future, and learning to be more present. It’s about recognizing that all of your life experiences matter. There is no wasted time.

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Kimberlee Auerbach is our guest blogger during the week of July 30th. If you have any questions for Kimberlee Auerbach, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about The Devil, the Lovers, and Me:

An irresistible memoir for anyone who's ever wondered what's coming next...

Kimberlee Auerbach has been in therapy. She's seen a Reiki Master. She's even given hypnosis a try. They can't give her want she wants... to know her future is going to be bright, that everything will be okay. So she makes an appointment with Iris Goldblatt, "tarot card reader and mirror of the soul." Instead of predicting the future, each card sparks a memory: like the time Kimberlee tried to be wild, and caught crabs from an Argentine painter; or the night her father "proposed" at Morton's Steakhouse (presenting her with an engagement ring for her boyfriend to use); or the moment Kimberlee found the strength to kick out her freeloading ex. In a Wizard of Oz-like twist of fate, Kimberlee realizes she had the answers all along-that's it's not about looking to the future, it's about trusting yourself along the way.

Exuberantly alive and refreshingly candid, The Devil, The Lovers & Me, will take you on a journey down one woman's path, only to reflect yours back. You, too, will see yourself in the cards ... The Devil, The Lovers, even the Fool.

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I was invited to a business lunch at Penguin to pitch for The Eyre Affair in July of 1999, and that first meeting was mildly strange, to say the least. I'd heard the rumours, of course, but I just thought the stories were urban myths - wild fabrications invented by agents and authors who had had one too many pink gins before a meeting.

The first thing you notice upon entering the lobby at Penguin towers is a small man next to the elevators, who has a selection of outdoor clothes on a rack just beside him.

"Where are you heading?" he asks brightly, and when I reply 'Penguin' he gives a knowing nod and hands me a lined gore-tex jacket and woolly hat.

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I'm one of those people who feel inexplicably guilty when being questioned by anyone in a uniform, even when I haven't done anything wrong - and in all likelihood, never will. It's probably the coward in me. It makes me a pushover when Girl-Guides are selling me cookies at the door. They know me by now, and only have to insist I buy six tons of Brownies and I'm writing a cheque.

Anyway, a wonderful thing happened as I was being questioned, fingerprinted, cross-checked and photographed prior to entry at JFK yesterday. The immigration officer was a steely-eyed mega-serious woman of perhaps forty with a name tag that read 'Flint', which I wasn't sure referred to her name, or her demeanour. She asked the purpose of my visit and I gabbled:

"I'm an author. I write books. I'm on tour. Yes, that's it. An author .... on a book tour."

She stops what she's doing and fixes me with her grey eyes, which seem to bore into me like cork screws.

"You've written a book?"

"Several, actually," I reply, swallowing nervously. Her eyes don't leave mine for a second.

"What's it about?"

I suddenly feel like a startled rabbit caught in the headlamps of a massive 18-wheeler, horn blaring at 3:00 AM on a deserted forest road somewhere. My mind goes blank. What is the book about? What are any of my books about? I finally find my voice and answer in a strangled, dry-throated squeak:

"Um, er, well, gosh - it's a bit tricky to explain but...."

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Jasper Fforde is our guest blogger during the week of July 23th. If you have any questions for Jasper Fforde, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about Thursday Next: First Among Sequels:

Literary sleuth Thursday Next is out to save literature in the fifth installment of Jasper Fforde’s wildly popular series

Beloved for his prodigious imagination, his satirical gifts, his literate humor, and sheer silliness, Jasper Fforde has delighted book lovers since Thursday Next first appeared in The Eyre Affair, a genre send-up hailed as an instant classic. Since the no-nonsense literary detective from Swindon made her debut, literature has never been quite the same. Neither have nursery rhymes, for that matter. With two successful books of the Nursery Crime series under his belt, Fforde takes up once again the brilliant adventures of his signature creation in the highly anticipated fifth installment of the Thursday Next series. And it’s better than ever.

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The Origins of Language Earliest Origins Until the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment (a European intellectual movement), most thinking about the origin of language had assumed it began with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

The most recent theory of the origin of language is that simple hand gestures were used as long ago as six or seven million years, shortly after the first humans diverged from the apes. Shouting would have been used as alarm calls or emotional outbursts. About five million years ago, an early hominid, started to walk upright, and a more complex form of gesturing was probably used. Then, two million years ago the brain size increased and hand gestures were used in various combinations as the primary means of communication. As recently as 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens may have changed the main means of communication from hand and facial gestures to vocal-isations and the use of differing sounds to convey meanings. Gradually the use of gesturing diminished, although we still use it today to emphasise speech, even during telephone conversations, when the person at the other end cannot see the gestures.

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The Book of Origins is for people who want to know how and when things began, where they came from, and why they started.

For instance, the telephone was invented in 1876 by Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) at the age of 29. He had succeeded in transmitting speech sounds the year before.

Elisha Gray (1835-1901) also invented the telephone in 1876, but Bell beat him to the Patent Office by just a few hours. A major court battle followed which went in favour of Bell. Unlike Bell, Gray had produced a working prototype in 1874, but neglected to patent it.

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Trevor Homer is our guest blogger during the week of July 16th. If you have any questions for Trevor Homer, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about The Book of Origins:

Everything—from the mundane (the pencil) to the catastrophic (the atom bomb)—has an origin, but often it’s not what we expect. A few things you may not have known

• Gandhi was married at age thirteen!
• Chinese fortune cookies are an American invention and were not eaten in China until the 1990s when they were advertised as “Genuine American Fortune Cookies.”
• Bayer lost the trademark for aspirin (which they had held since 1897) as part of the reparations Germany was forced to pay after World War I.
• The original idea for the electric chair came from an American dentist.

For aspiring mindblowers and wanna-be know-it-alls, The Book of Origins is a treasure trove of trivia and fascinating facts guaranteed to entertain and enlighten.

About Trevor Homer

Trevor Homer was born and educated in the Black Country and is a former British Amateur Champion golfer. He represented England seventeen times, winning the European Team Championship in 1973, and Great Britain and Northern Ireland eleven times.

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A patient asked me yesterday how did we get so fat as a nation. He was overweight and his family was too and he had come in at a young age of 42 for high blood pressure.

It seems as though everyone has the answers to this question, yet we are still getting fatter. So what is the answer? I believe that it is very complex and the reason we have gotten fatter as a nation does not have just one answer.

We are fatter because:

• We eat too much
• We don’t cook at home
• We do whatever is fastest and easiest- so we don’t take the stairs, we use the elevator etc.
• Our kids watch too much TV and video games.
• If we are not running around like chickens with our heads cut off, then we are too tired to do anything
• We shop for convenience foods, because they are fast and easy.
• We don’t make the time for ourselves.

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Ok today we are going to tackle the big question of, EXERCISE. First, I would like to review some of the greatest excuses that I have heard over the years:

• “I would walk, but the dog doesn’t like to go that far”
• “It is too hot outside”
• “It is always raining”
• “I might miss my favorite show”
• “I can’t get up early”

Exercise is one of those things that I have found that a majority of my patients don’t do for one reason or another. I have found that for every excuse there is an answer to the problem. For example:

“I don’t have time when I get home”- Get up earlier or try to walk on your lunch break. If you can’t do it all in one block break it up, into time segments that you can manage.

“I have bad knees, I can’t walk or run well”- Try to bike to help the knees or get a video that uses chair exercises for the upper body. Swimming is also a great low impact exercise. Many people have also had success with an elliptical machine that is low impact on the knees and back.