When I Write A New Draft, I

The Idea Of Legitimacy Is Something I Suppose I Deal With In My Fiction, And In Part It's Probably A Response To My Upbringing. When I Was Growing Up I Was The Middle Child, Pathologically Shy, In A Family With A Very Loud And Opinionated Older Brother, And I Felt As If I Never Had The Right To Speak. As A Result, I Simply Didn't Speak Very Much.

Even Still, We Run. We Have Not Reached Our Average Of 57.92 Years Without Knowing That You Run Through It, And It Hurts And You Run Through It Some More, And If It Hurts Worse, You Run Through It Even More, And When You Finish, You Will Have Broken Through. In The End, When You Are Done, And Stretching, And Your Heartbeat Slows, And Your Sweat Dries, If You've Run Through The Hard Part, You Will Remember No Pain.

But I've Married A Deeply Sensible Person Who Is Extremely Good At Talking Me Down From My Various Ledges, And Who Takes Care Of Me In A Billion Ways.

My Son Is Actually Named After Beck, The Musician. We Heard Beck On The Radio And Thought That Was A Good Nickname For A Child. We Named Our Son Beckett So We Could Call Him Beck - We Reverse Engineered. And Then After He Was Born And I Saw The Name On The Birth Certificate I Realized Beckett Was A Really Pretentious Name, Way Too Literary. Luckily He's Grown Into It. We Nearly Named My Second Son Dashiell. Can You Imagine? Beckett And Dashiell. It Would Have Been A Disaster Of Pretentiousness.

I'm Ambivalent About The Orange Prize. I Was Really Proud To Be Shortlisted Alongside The Other Writers, Whom I Admire. That Said, I Don't Know If It's Best Way Of Addressing Gender Inequality Problems.