The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.

I like to go where the life is.

I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn to write in writing courses.

I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.