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

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

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

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.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

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.

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