The stereotypical gay man is someone whose company I enjoy, someone who makes me laugh, someone I'd want my kid to be. The stereotypical gay woman makes me insecure, conscious of my failings as a feminist.

I really think we were charting a course to having a more sane response to mass incarceration, to drug use, and to understanding that the war on drugs has resulted only in the empowerment of vast criminal enterprises and the destruction of democracies around the world. And all that is coming to a miserable, horrific halt.

I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that.

I was a federal public defender during the most important years of the drug war. I saw people go to jail for nothing, and go to jail for a long time.

When you consider America, there are hundreds of millions of people who have smoked marijuana illegally.

I am an adamant feminist. It never occurred to me to take my husband's name when we married. I am a supporter of abortion rights, of equal pay for equal work, of the rights of women prisoners, of all the time-honored feminist causes, and then some.

Why is it that loving something provides such little protection from betrayal?