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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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