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

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.

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.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

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.

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

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.