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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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