When you're pregnant, you can think of nothing but having your own body to yourself again; yet after giving birth you realize that the biggest part of you is now somehow external, subject to all sorts of dangers and disappearance, so you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to keep her close enough for comfort. That's the strange thing about being a mother: Until you have a baby, you don't even realize how much you were missing one.

I keep quite busy, walk 5 miles a day, and have an excellent hairdresser who keeps the gray out of my red hair.

Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.

And in general, the residents of the town wondered why they all felt hollow just beneath the throat, the result of missing something they had never been able to name in the first place.

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

Is Fate getting what you deserve, or deserving what you get?

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.