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

So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed.

The idea you can tell a writer of a specific religion to stop writing about that religion is presumptuous.

Women are far and away the bigger consumers of fiction than men, but men are still far and away the more reviewed, the more critically esteemed, the more respected. That can get frustrating.

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.

I think there are a lot of books about thin, attractive people having thin, attractive people's problems. I'm better set up to tell a different story.

Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce.