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

As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did.

I hope that's what I've taught my girls - to be fair, to recognize their own position and their own good fortune, to use their voices to make things better. Beyond that, I'd tell them just to be kind.

When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me - white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I'll go and whom I'll meet inside.

We dated in our early 20s, when we were working at the same newspaper. We broke up, got back together and broke up again. I wanted to get married and have kids, but he wasn't ready. So I married someone else, had my daughters and the marriage ended ... and there was Bill. He'd never gotten married and was finally, finally ready. We discovered that we were still each other's favorite people to talk to.

When an older writer tries to tell a younger writer through a review what kind of career she should be pursuing, it tends to speak to the reviewer's anxieties rather than the book itself.

I think I'm much more comfortable talking about other books than my own!