When we decided to leave the United States after the 2016 election results, I wasn’t thinking it was the last time I would see my parents. Still, there was something nagging at me as we sold our cars and furniture and shipped our keepsakes and books to France. Even though I expected to see my parents again, and even though I knew if they fell ill, I could fly home, I felt a need to have the conversation — the one most of us don’t have until someone we love is dying.

In the midst of my 35th year, I contracted a bad case of baby fever. It happened all at once like an abrupt wall of brake lights on the Hollywood freeway. Until then, I thought the biological clock was a myth created by women dissatisfied with their careers or trying to mend wayward marriages.

If you're like me, you're fascinated by actors who can transform themselves on stage and play multiple characters convincingly in a sitting. That's acting. The inimitable Marlon Brando, who died ten years ago, said that acting is not an art, it is a business, but anyone watching his oeuvre of films would disagree. Let's agree that acting is a craft, like any art, that must be practiced and honed.