Mothers ... would do anything to steer their daughter the right way. It is frustrating beyond measure for them when a daughter screams, 'You don't understand, and you'll never understand!' The mother stamps her foot in aggravation, but in this case the daughter is right: the mother doesn't understand. She merely remembers, and memory is separate from experience.

Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.

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

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

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.