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

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

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.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

What the altar-bound of today end up buying from their numberless vendors is a dog's breakfast of bridal excess - part society wedding of the twenties, part Long Island Italian wedding of the fifties. It's The Philadelphia Story and The Wedding Singer served up together in one curious and costly buffet.

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