If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it's hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren't always happy ones.

Every mother I've ever met, pretty much without exception, is doing the best job she can ever do.

I went to Princeton, I minored in women's studies.

It's like if a young woman writes it, then it's chick lit. We don't care if she's slaying vampires or working as a nanny or living in Philadelphia. It's chick lit, so who cares? You know what we call what men write? Books.

Writing let me escape... It let me escape the insistent tug of my family, and its ongoing misery. Sitting in front of the computer, with the screen blank and the cursor blinking, was the best escape I knew. And there was plenty to escape from.

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.

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.