I Don't Do Research For My Novels.

A Week In The Hospital She Had Told Us. A Hysterectomy, She Had Said. It Had Seemed Unremarkable To Me In A Woman Of Forty-six Long Finished With Childbearing, Although Every Day That I Grow Older I Realize There Is Never Anything Unremarkable About Losing Any Part Of What Makes You Female - A Breast, A Womb, A Child, A Man.

Figuring Out Who You Are Is The Whole Point Of The Human Experience.

I'll Tell You The Truth - I Went To A Women's College, Barnard, The Most Selective College For Women In America Today. If There's One Thing I Came Out Of Barnard With, Because It Was A Women's College And A Great Institution Of Higher Education, It Was Fearlessness.

Reading Has Always Been Life Unwrapped To Me, A Way Of Understanding The World And Understanding Myself Through Both The Unknown And The Everyday. If Being A Parent Consists Often Of Passing Along Chunks Of Ourselves To Unwitting-often Unwilling-recipients, Then Books Are, For Me, One Of The Simplest And Most Sure-fire Ways Of Doing That.

Raising A Child Is A Little Like Picasso's Work; In The Beginning He Did Very Conventional Representational Things. Cubism Came After He Had The Rules Down Pat.