Genres are just bottles for the various boats. The boats matter to me.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

But there it is: Everyone is alone, for life, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

Genres are just bottles for the various boats. The boats matter to me.

Sometimes when reading aloud to my husband, I'll start crying. It completely stuns me. As if the words in my body and on the page - in relation to each other - are cocooned against my own feelings about what I'm writing until they're loosed in the air and become their own. Then I realize what I may or may not have done.

Women are constantly underestimated in our power, our reach, our collective pull.