Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.

Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.

In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist.

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.

My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.