I had been afraid of breast cancer, as I suspect most women are, from the time I hit adolescence. At that age, when our emerging sexuality is our central preoccupation, the idea of disfigurement of a breast is particularly horrifying.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite.

When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his 'cap,' or head, and Al Cap is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.

Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.