I will say in open adoption, all these choices you make about race, about the amount of mental illness you can deal with, about special needs and physical maladies, you have to lay all this out there before you know anybody's story.

The birth mother is placing the baby out of love. I still believe that. Well, the ones weve dealt with who were actually pregnant, anyway.

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.

With domestic adoption, you get a form, you fill it out, and there are these boxes: African-American, African-American and Hispanic, and you check the boxes that you're comfortable with. Race is completely open in that regard.

I want to say that, in general, when it works, open adoption is great.

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 feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers.