In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or tragedy or titillation or grossness or even sentimentality can move us, but how the written word elicits delight - what Nabokov calls that shiver in the spine - is much harder to calculate and define.

A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn. But it was more for me - it was that women of that generation were even less likely to express themselves, more likely to have that active interior life that they didn't dare speak out. So I was interesting in women of that era. I was interested in the language of that era. There's so much. And, certainly, this is cultural, so much there wasn't spoken about.

As a writer, I'm too busy and worried to experience the delight while composing my own work, although, of course, I hope a reader will find something of it when the work is complete. But I do try to figure out where in their experiences certain characters of mine, who are not necessarily readers, and certainly not writers or artists, find an equivalent sensation: of delight, of astonishment, of whatever it is that briefly - and brevity seems essential - reassures us, connects us, sends a shiver of inarticulate recognition down our spines: Oh, yes: life.

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

My love for the child asleep in the crib, the child's need for me, for my vigilance, had made my life valuable in a way that even the most abundantly offered love, my parents', my brother's, even Tom's, had failed to do. Love was required of me now--to be given, not merely to be sought and returned.