Many writers do write about their families and their immediate loved ones and love experiences, either as children or as adults. And very often people get offended by it.

I think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.

Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.

You need your freedom. You need to be able to do what you want to do as a journalist, as a person who's speaking for other women as you speak for yourself, and you make a choice. You have to be tough enough to take the consequences of that choice.

Most of us don't have mothers who blazed a trail for us--at least, not all the way. Coming of age before or during the inception of the women's movement, whether as working parents or homemakers, whether married or divorced, our mothers faced conundrums--what should they be? how should they act?--that became our uncertainties.

I would prefer you not to say, "That was the most terribly written piece I've ever read." That would hurt me. But you don't think I'm the best person in the world? Well, alright.