I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.

About 52% of the world's population is female. But most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said 'The higher you go, the fewer women there are.'

How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much'.

She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.

I think it's important to humanize history; fiction can help us remember. A lot of books I've read in the past have been so much more important than textbooks - there is an emotional connection with one particular person. I'm very much of a research-is-important type of fiction writer, even for contemporary fiction. I wrote about blogs in America and I've never blogged. But I read many, many blogs - usually about feminist things, or about race, or about hair.