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.

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.

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.

I did not intend to be a writer. I first wanted to be a lawyer, like my father. Then I got bit by the bug of philosophy and wanted to be a philosophy professor. I went to graduate school and quickly discovered it was impossible for a woman in those days - this was the early fifties - to be a philosopher, so I gave that up.

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.

When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity.