Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It's much better if one simply does.

I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.

I've told the same story twelve different ways, but I think that's just part of what writers do. Once may not be enough.

My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good.

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.

How deep is our desire to do better than our mothers--to bring daughters into adulthood strong and fierce yet loving and gentle, adventurous and competitive but still nurturing and friendly, sweet yet sharp. We know as working women that we can't quite have it all, but that hasn't stopped us from wanting it all for them.