I love it when people ask who my influences are... or what my favorite part of my last book was... or the last great book I read.

This is motherhood for you,' said my own mother. 'Going through life with your heart outside your body.

Maybe it stems from my newspaper-reporting days, but I took notes the whole time - getting the call, how I felt. As soon as I put pen to paper, it became a story [Hunger Heart], not something happening to me but something I was recording.

People will want you to behave a certain way, to make a certain choice because it reinforces the way they see the world...But you have to do what's right for you.

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.

Having a day job again I found really kind of fueled my fiction, because it became almost this forbidden thing where I had to sneak off and do it in private.

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.