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

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.

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

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

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

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

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