I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.

If you get divorced in New York, you go into therapy and will talk to anybody you meet on the sidewalk about it.

My first job was when I was about 12, cleaning houses in the afternoons for different elderly women in town. I hated it.

I would also hope that readers receive a larger understanding, or a different understanding, of what it means to be human, than they might have had before. We suffer from being quick to judge, quick to make excuses for ourselves and others, and I would like the reader to feel that we are all, more or less, in a similar state as we love and disappoint one another, and that we try, most of us, as best we can, and that to fail and succeed is what we do.

No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.

All these lives," she said. "All the stories we never know." (125)

Without a doubt my mother was an inspiration for my writing. This is true in many ways, but mostly because she is a wonderful storyteller, without even knowing it.