When I started to write, it was the '70s, and throughout that decade, we didn't have any problems with book challenges or censorship.

[When I was a kid] I was a surgeon, amputating legs and arms of my paper dolls. And I had a little board with little tacks that I would tack them down to do this.

When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.

My mother never talked about sex. I was on the Dr. Ruth [ Westheimer] show once - this is years and years and years ago - and it was her Mother's Day show. And I didn't know what we were going to talk about but what she decided we were going to talk about was female masturbation. My mother had invited all her girlfriends. And you know these were all women in their late seventy's maybe they were in their eighty's by then and then and they were horrified because Dr Ruth had a little she had a little chart up you know "female masturbation".

Fear is often disguised as moral outrage.

I didn't know I was really a writer until I read it in the New York Times. And then I thought, "Oh my god, maybe I can really do this". That was a review of "Margaret."

I thought ["Summer Sisters" ] would be a children's book - two girls who summer together from very different backgrounds. And then when it just kept going and going and going. They kept getting older.