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.

I used to teach at a private school, and the parents thought I loved their children. I did not love their children! I liked them well enough, but I was always delighted to see them go off for summer vacation.

Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

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

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

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

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