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

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.

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

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.

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

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.