People say I'm not good at writing about men. My dad left when I was 16. Give me a break. I'm doing the best I can.

There's nothing wrong with keeping your mouth shut if you don't have anything nice to say.

I wished that my job was baking muffins in a muffin shop, where all I'd have to do was crack eggs and measure flour and make change, and nobody could abuse me, and where they'd even expect me to be fat. Every flab roll and cellulite crinkle would serve as testimony to the excellence of my baked goods

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.

Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution's way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty.

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.