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.

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

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.

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

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.

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