However, there will be a Republican Party platform that will coalesce around their convention. Unless I miss my guess, it will be considerably more conservative on these issues, perhaps even than Governor Romney is, and I think that that will give Americans a clear set of choices about all issues, but about women's issues too.

What had I expected of the first child? Everything. Rocket scientist. Neurosurgeon. Designated hitter. We talked wisely at cocktail parties about the sad mistake our mothers had made in pinning all their hopes and dreams on us. We were full of it.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any money, which continues to be a problem for novelists the world over.

For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver--that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it.