I feel sometimes like a book tour is a slow series of humiliations and that if you're strong you'll come out of it OK.

I really don't feel that writing is therapy.

History releases me from my own experience and jogs my fictional imagination.

My father is an economist who specialized in foreign food policy, and my mother worked for AID, a branch of the State Department, so food in regards to world affairs was talked about a lot.

The past always sort of haunts us and perhaps inspires us in some ways.

The process of open adoption is not discussed in the way it should be. Everyone I know who has adopted domestically has at least one tragic story. It was important to me to be able to describe those situations.

I think we think that parenthood is confined to the country of mothers, but I think a lot of the men I've spoken to and the men who have read my books - I've been surprised by this actually - have a fierce attachment to being parents and to being fathers. And just as we, a lot of women I know, want this, men too want to pass down what they have to pass down.