And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts.

Identity politics are wearisome; you don't want to go on speaking for any one group as a writer.

In the publishing world, most editors are probably women. So I don't see the publishing world as a male-dominated one, especially within fiction.

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.

Writing is nearly always a matter of finding whatever your brain needs to trick it into being creative, and in my case, a tiny little bit of fact just seems to work.

Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.

The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.