I know that it's very dispiriting for people in their twenties, who expected to graduate from college, get their own apartments, get a job, and move forward with their lives, and in fact are still now living with Mom and Dad, which is challenging for all involved.

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

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.

These are my words; this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.