I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

I think that one of the great things about spending - as in my case - twenty-something years with somebody is that at some point you do love the actual person. They're there little by little, the outline is really pretty clear.

Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person.

I’m not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don’t seek a wide swath of feedback.

Life's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get through.

As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.

We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else. Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than other women who think: Oh, goodness, well, if I let the lid off, where would we be?