Maybe for you, like me, music is the catalyst for a whole raft of memories: My inner freedom-fighter rising up to the sound of the “Les Miserables” touring company's entreaty, “Do You Hear the People Sing?”; My heart filling up to my throat when my husband harmonized with his brothers on “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” at my in-laws' basement parties; My whole body vibrating to the drums of Springsteen's “Candy's Room,” at Michigan State University's Munn Ice Arena. These songs are encoded in my...

I've spent the past two years talking about my story, as part of the tour for my memoir, “It's Hard Being You.” “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” a quote from the author Joan Didion, is the epigraph for my book, and it's been my privilege to meet many people who have amplified the truth of that statement profoundly. I'm not the only one who's come to realize that we must take what happens to us and find a place for it in our life stories. Either that, or we bury what happens...

That headline is the description I put on this photo way back in 2013, when my husband and I were just tiptoeing into the tremendous...