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.

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

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.

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

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.

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