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

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

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.

Sexism goes so deep that at first it's hard to see; you think it's just reality.

People often say to me now, "Your work changed my life." I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but they say it had a big effect on them and enabled them to change. I'm not sure I believe that a book will cause someone to change.

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

The movement for women's liberation was about an emotional transformation, an explosion, a feeling all over the country that things must be different, and ideas about how they should be. I think fiction can capture that kind of thing better than other genres because in fiction you can explore the feelings of your characters - the before and the after.