When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.

I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances of the characters as individual psychological plights. That's my preference; still, a lot of people do read my novels as psychological studies, and they're right to read them that way too, if that's what they mean to them.

In my books, my idea is always to explore social context and social forces.

Being alone for a woman is probably much more scary than for a man. I'm all for getting over our fears by facing them head-on.

I don't really think myself that sex work is necessarily more demeaning than other kinds of demeaning work.

Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.

I think you get mentally ill being homeless. Most of the bag ladies wind up mentally ill pretty quickly - what people would call paranoid - because they are in such danger. I don't know if it's really paranoia because they are in great danger. Terrible things happen to them, and they lose everything. How could they not become at the very least severely depressed?