If it’s late at night, past the accepted hours of picking up the phone to call even your best girlfriend, and you’re tossing and turning...do yourself a favor: step out of bed, make a cup of tea, and curl up with this audio excerpt from Anna Quindlen’s intimate and hilarious new memoir “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.” You’ll find yourself in the company of a new friend (or old, if you’ve been reading her books and columns for years) and be reminded of why the Pulitzer Prize winning author has been dubbed “America’s laureate of real life.”

The book’s chapter titles -- including “Stuff,” “Girlfriends,” “Solitude,” “Older,” and “Faith” -- capture her laser-like focus on the challenges, preoccupations, and dreams of modern American life. With hard-earned wisdom and perspective, Quindlen makes the insights and observations that our best selves, at our most true, could unearth and articulate. She’s self-deprecating in a way that makes her trustworthy and unafraid of highlighting her own inner contradictions.

In this excerpt’s light but poignant critique of our culture’s increasing materialism, she catalogs her own collection of “stuff” -- from countless types of chairs to the endless needlepoint she creates while watching TV. "And that's not even counting the stuff in my closet. One day I peered inside and realized it looked like it belong to someone with multiple personality disorder. The bohemian look, the sharp suits, the frilly dresses. Those days are behind me, and I finally know who and how I'm dressing. I'm dressing a person who has eighteen pairs of black pants and eleven pairs of black pumps." Sounds like someone we could spend lots of time with: ourselves.