I don't trust happiness. I turn it over as if it were a glass at a flea market or a rug at a souk, looking for chipped rims or loose threads.

I think it has as much to do with honoring my own voice as it does with feeling a responsibility to my readers or my daughters.

I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.

I'm so glad that social media gives me a chance to do that, to celebrate books I love and help proselytize for books I love.

There are a lot of women like me in the world, and we rarely get to see ourselves.

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

My sense is that beautiful women are living in a different world than I am, and that it's a world with benefits but also drawbacks - like, you're on a ticking clock, because the day you stop being supermodel-beautiful is the day that everything the world has to offer you is no longer being offered.