For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.

Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.

I think it’s very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

No woman that I know is capable of leaving her child down for thirty seconds. She can't walk away without making sure that everything is absolutely as secure and safe for her child as can be.