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.

Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have -- that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.

I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.

I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.

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

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

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