Many writers secretly long to be performers. You always get the 'if you weren't a writer' question. I would be a back-up singer, to stand in the back and go like 'do, do, do.

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.

My publisher feels that my readers are loyal to the voice of my stories, the characters I'm creating.

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.

This is the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me,” I said, through my tear-clogged throat. “I want you to know that.” But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true. In the grand, historical scheme of things, my father leaving us was doubtlessly worse. Which is one of the many things that sucked about my father?? he forever robbed me of the possibility of telling another man, This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and meaning it.

Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you, the thing you think you can't survive...it's the thing that makes you better than you used to be.

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.