I'm so glad that social media gives me a chance to do that, to celebrate books I love and help proselytize for books I love.

I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.

This is motherhood for you,' said my own mother. 'Going through life with your heart outside your body.

I'm not cut out to be a famous person; I can't do my hair and makeup well enough.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

As the days piled up into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and fall slid into winter, I realized one of the great truths about tragedy: You can dream of disappearing. You can wish for oblivion, for endless sleep or the escape of fiction, of walking into a river with your pockets full of stones, of letting the dark water close over your head. But if you've got kids, the web of the world holds you close and wraps you tight and keeps you from falling no matter how badly you think you want to fall.

I struggle with the fact that men's popular fiction is talked about differently. Books like mine don't get as many reviews and probably won't win any prizes, but they entertain the pants off of hundreds of thousands of women.