I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.

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.

There are so many examples today of how the kind of wonderful zealousness and unquestioning loyalty of young people can be harnessed by all sorts of insidious powers.

My mother was wonderfully out about her dementia. She would sort of - she would say to me, I came out to the window cleaner about having dementia. You know, I love the way that verb for coming out of the closet has now become so socially useful for all sorts of situations, like when you need to explain to the window cleaner that you don't know if you paid him or not.

There may be certain genres that men dominate, but fiction not so much. The question of prizes is tricky because there are so many prizes.

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.

I've been in a long and happy relationship for 22 years and it's never inspired me to write anything. It's too good - nothing to say. Problems, conflict, that's what makes for good stories.