There are a million moving parts to raising kids, and you can't always anticipate them all, especially when they are teenagers and their peers play such a huge role in their lives. If you offer independence, there is one kind of pitfall; if you shelter them too much, there is another. And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

In life, the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end.

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.

I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.

Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.