If you focus all of your emotional passion on your children and you neglect the relationship that brought that family into existence... eventually, things can go really, really wrong.

For a couple of months there I was shrieking like a banshee.

I’ve sometimes thought that it’s only by recalling that desperate devotion my kids once felt for me that I can maintain my own desperate devotion in the face of their adolescent sneering.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

A good mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer. She remembers to make play dates, her children's clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games.

I certainly don't think it's inevitable that we don't love children who don't carry our own DNA. If that were true we wouldn't have millions of successful adoptions to consider. I do think that it's harder to love a child when you come into that child's life after the unrequited passion of infancy and early childhood has passed.

The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is discipline.