My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.

I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.

This can't be true but I remember it.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.