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.

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

To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.

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

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.

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

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.