Even more than getting compliments on social media, what I love is when some random stranger says something very funny or insightful about my books, often in 140 characters or less! It's a very casual, low-stakes, non-burdensome way of connecting that I think is fun for both the writer and the reader. And there are a lot of clever people out there who have no connection to publishing.

I was 16 years old, attending boarding school, and I loved Pride and Prejudice. From the opening pages, I loved it. And I will say in my class, not one but two boys told me that I reminded them of Lizzy Bennet. I didn't realize it at the time but this was the nicest thing that any male would ever say to me. This was as good as it got.

Obviously the bar is much higher now for a behavior to be scandalous. Social media has really changed the way people live. It's not a new impulse; it's just being enacted in a new way.

... nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.

She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it.

In life we're most hell-bent on proving things that we're not really sure are true.

She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.