She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.

I grew up with a feminist mom and the understanding that, as someone coming from a position of (relative) privilege, it was my job to speak up when things weren't fair.

...thinking that the world was like an orange, that I could split it open with my thumbnail and find a whole different world, the grown-up world, the secrets beneath the skin.

I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish.

Stephen King writes mass fiction but gets reviewed by the New York Times and writes for the New Yorker. Critics say to me, "Shut up and enjoy your money," and I think, OK, I'll shut up and enjoy my money, but why does Stephen King get to enjoy his money and get reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review?

Many writers secretly long to be performers. You always get the 'if you weren't a writer' question. I would be a back-up singer, to stand in the back and go like 'do, do, do.

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.