Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it.

The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it's going to be the next minute.

The idea was to focus on the primal drama of parenthood: the way from moment to moment you swing from comforter to tormentor, just as kids simultaneously light up our lives and drive us nuts. I was trying to capture that strange, bipolar quality of parenthood. For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it's not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you'll ever have.

What writing ROOM taught me was that I know exactly how to be the perfect mother, but I'm not willing to do it for more than ten minutes at a time.

There are some tales not for telling, whether because they are too long, too precious, too laughable, too painful, too easy to need telling or too hard to explain. After all, after years and travels my secrets are all I have left to chew on in the night.

I think I know what it's like to have a family that the outside world sees as peculiar or lacking.

I read a lot of social history. If I'm in an art gallery and a picture intrigues me, I immediately write down the title and I google it. I do a lot of googling and looking out for good stories. I can almost smell them sometimes.