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.

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

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

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

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.

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.

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