I didn't set out to write a book with no real male characters, but men were not important to my narrator, who was much more interested in maternal and pseudo-maternal love, so they were unimportant to me. I didn't even notice the lack of men in the story until I finished it. But once I did notice it, I was kind of delighted. Apparently, my subconscious is totally sexist.

Anybody who severs their own Achilles tendon, takes blood thinners to induce a hospital stay , or beats themselves with their fists hurts themselves as much, if not more, than they benefit from the attention they derive from their actions. Con artists usually benefit from misleading others without sacrificing anything themselves. All my girls have sacrificed plenty.

I didn't set out to write a book with no real male characters, but men were not important to my narrator, who was much more interested in maternal and pseudo-maternal love, so they were unimportant to me. I didn't even notice the lack of men in the story until I finished it. But once I did notice it, I was kind of delighted. Apparently, my subconscious is totally sexist.

Going from memoir to fiction was fantastic. I had been afraid to move away from memoir; I'd written some novel drafts, but they weren't well received by my agent at the time, and it had been drilled into me that "memoir outsells fiction two to one" (not sure if that's true anymore, or if it ever was), so I felt like the only smart thing to do, professionally, was to keep mining my life for painful moments to recapitulate.

Those of us who obsess over every word and action are constantly recalling past events, but that doesn't make them any less painful, nor does it help us transcend them. To write memoir, you have to not only recollect past events, you have to revisit them. You have to get back to the mental and emotional state you were in during those events.

I remain an active volunteer in the field of at-risk youth, so I'm pretty familiar with the landscape as it stands now, but I don't have any qualifications or an exhaustive body of research to back up my observations.

I feel a lot of sympathy for the young women I've written about, including Younger Janice. I think that all of them (me in Girlbomb, Samantha in Have You Found Her, and Elizabeth in I, Liar) had some early family trauma that contributed to their dysfunctional methods of dealing with the world, but I wouldn't call them/myself victims - survivors, maybe, but not victims. Nor do I think of them/myself as con artists.