How we lie to ourselves when we've fallen in love with the wrong man.

It's always gratifying to hear from a passionate reader, and as a longtime educator, I'm especially pleased and heartened when that reader is a young student who is inspired to write me and let me know that my book has helped him or her find her way.

Reading is a way to take in the difficult situations and understand them. The whole point of reading a book in class is to have discussion about what these situations are like.

Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, "I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me." That could be the motto of literature!

As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, 'I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure.

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. 'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.