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

My mirror image always had to be interpreted. And for that I sought my reflection in someone else's eyes.

I am a feminist. I'm trying to show the relationships between men and women, always the structural relations, not individual villains. I'd never make a husband a villain. I try very hard in my work not to - because if I made one man a villain, the rest would be off the hook. I'm interested in the system of oppression.

Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.

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

I see old age not as something to hide from or dread (though there is much to oppose in the usual treatment of the old) but rather as something to embrace as the natural and inevitable end.

There is a lot of gender segregation. You still have many poor women who work in women-only jobs. In the family, in most cases, only women have the double job of working outside the home and taking care of the family.