By now it’s widely agreed that Hillary Clinton blew her history-making campaign for President. She did not lose because she was female. And yet it was the inconvenient fact of her gender that pushed her supporters to downplay her empathetic side and come on like an aggressive, armoured warrior queen. Now John McCain has stunned his party by picking first-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Just how big are those famous 18 million cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling?

The Space Cowboy, a tattooed trickster from Australia, wowed my jaded grandson at Buskerfest, Toronto’s annual celebration of street theatre. Then it was time for grownup entertainment: the Toronto premiere of Jersey Boys, which celebrates the triumphantly hummable hits of the Four Seasons while telling a human story about being undone by one’s own hard-won dream and finding the grace to go on. If this show doesn’t pull in the crowds, I’ll swallow a double-edged sword.

Let’s hear it for paperbacks! They’re small enough to slip into your purse and light enough not to stress your shoulder. You can read them on planes, on elliptical machines and while trying to stay balanced on a lurching subway car at rush hour. Plus, they’re affordably priced for book clubs and gift lists. So if you’ve been waiting for the paperback edition of My Mother’s Daughter, here’s some good news: today is the day.

When I was 14, with a brand-new $35 guitar and my own frizzy take on Joan Baez’s flowing hair, I sent a buck to the Columbia Record Club and acquired a whole clutch of LPs for my folk collection: Peter, Paul and Mary (too slick), the New Christy Minstrels (too hokey), Harry Belafonte (my grandmother’s heartthrob) and a minstrel poet who won my heart with his image on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

The Hamilton bus terminal, where I killed time yesterday while waiting for a friend to sweep me away to the Bob Dylan concert, is not my idea of a woman-friendly hangout. But I’d brought a good book to distract me and create a Dylanish mood: Straight from the Fridge, Dad: a Dictionary of Hipster Slang.

Okay, I accept it. I’m going to grow old. Either that or die too soon, a prospect so flat-out unacceptable that I’m practically ready to shout, “Bring on the signs of cronehood! The memory lapses, the wattles, the chin hairs and saggy bits! And while you’re at it, bring me a mighty cane that I can bang with authority and vigour when young pups displease me.”

When my best friend died of cancer this past winter, I was so unstrung by grief that one day I phoned her old number at the office, longing for the sound of her voice. Had I lost my mind? It seemed that way because I’d lost my personal historian, who cared enough to remember small details of my life that even I had forgotten long ago. And yet because she wasn’t family, my bereavement went unnoticed by the rest of the world. “Losing Val,” in the September issue of More, is my account of this life-changing, never-ending passage that every woman must face, sooner or later.

I’m breaking out the virtual champagne today. It’s been exactly one year since I launched ronamaynard.com, and connecting with you online has been even more rewarding than I could have guessed. In case you’re new to this community, I’ve rounded up a few of my favourite posts. If you’re an old friend, I’d love to know if yours is among them. Either way, thank you for coming. Without the inspiration you’ve provided in your comments and e-mail messages, this wouldn’t be my online home.

When it comes to sleep, I have long been a woman of firm convictions: I need eight hours, I can scrape by on six and if I don’t get my share I’ll be an addled, nauseated wraith with an obliterating headache. I was so fixated on sleep that I ended up with a nightly pill habit, which I’ve just beaten while following a strict and unwelcome set of rules that really work.

When I set out to break my sleeping pill habit, I schlepped by subway and bus to your basic red brick medical building. Alongside a mom with a stroller and an elderly gent in a wheelchair, I rode the elevator to the Toronto Sleep Clinic, where the walls are beige and the furniture best described as functional. It didn’t even cross my mind that I could have embarked on this adventure in style, at one of those high-end spas where you’re escorted to your treatment in the softest of robes as New Age music wafts in the fragrant air.

It happens to even the best matched couple. You look at your beloved and loving spouse in his underwear and think to yourself, “He’s a terrific guy but it’s been a long time since I had the hots for him.” I went looking for advice that makes sense (endorsed by experts but tested by real-life skeptics like you and me). You can read what I learned in the September issue of Best Health. The secret: dating your spouse.

Ever since John Edwards finally admitted his long-suspected affair, moralists have been denouncing the former presidential candidate as the worst sort of scumbag. Yet the truth is that all married people fail their spouse sooner or later–at times gri…

Next Saturday morning, instead of working out with a butt-kicking trainer who is mercifully away on vacation, we’ll be heading down the highway to a place of legend: the southern Ontario fruit farm where my husband briefly lived in his teens. This time of year, he used to stand under a likely-looking peach tree, extend his arm into the branches and let a perfectly sun-ripened peach drop into his waiting palm. Because I haven’t been blessed with this experience, I don’t know the glory of a peach–or so he has always maintained.

It was one of those unloved, unlovely things you can pass every day without noticing what it is you’ve seen. A man’s bike, sheathed in duct tape and many layers of thick black paint, with a matted plush tiger tail dangling from each handlebar. The mismatched reflectors on its wheels suggested a joyriding kid, but the ungainly proportions of the whole apparatus had an air of desperation, of cast-off parts cobbled together into a Frankenbike.

On doctor’s orders, I now get up and read in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, although my natural inclination is to thrash grimly in bed. I’ve found that the best books to read in the pre-dawn hours are the ones you can dip in and out of with no need to follow a plot–like the elegant, opinionated essays that comprise M.F.K. Fisher’s Last House, in which I found a wonderful contrarian view of insomnia.

I thought Paris Hilton was a sleek and shiny bimbo with no social graces until I discovered her tart satirical side in her video rebuttal of a John McCain ad.

The world does not look kindly on a woman who swaggers from bed to bed as men have always done. But to my mind, the real inequality is that a naked woman can’t display her cellulite in post-coital splendour the way a naked man displays his gut.

The world positively teems with terrific writing, not only on bookstore shelves but online, where eclectic prose and thought are available free to all comers. For readers this is a wonderful thing. For writers it’s profoundly humbling to know that people who love to read have more than enough options already to occupy their minds and hearts for a great many lifetimes.

I’d been hoping for a daughter who would play with dolls as I used to do. Instead I had a son with a passion for trucks (the noisier, the better). It was not what I expected, but I’ve learned to like surprises.

This holiday Monday, I have our loft to myself, with sunlight streaming from end to end of the place and none of the usual Monday sound track (rumbling buses, boisterous pedestrians) from the street outside. A year or even a week from now, I won’t remember the sweet languor of this moment in my life unless I capture it now.

Women learn early to bite their tongues and let other people have the floor. We’re so well trained in solicitude that we often need permission to speak. That’s what my friend Elaine provides every summer at a raucous dinner party in our garden. She always asks us, one by one, to tell the group how our lives have changed since last year. The resulting stories prove that there’s no such thing as a life without drama.