Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.

We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something.

There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'

I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.