For two years I watched my parents' lives wind to a close. This made me aware of old age as a one stage, the final one, of a long journey.

Our society has very much limited our choices, even regarding the food we think acceptable.

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?

For many decades my relations with my parents constituted unfinished business. I had dealt with them through sheer avoidance and guilt.

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.

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

As I experienced life on the island, without electricity, plumbing or telephone, I thought it was important to show that people can live as I did without dying or falling apart. I wanted people to understand that we don't need everything that our culture tells us we have to have to be satisfied.