I always thought it was what I wanted: to be loved and admired. Now I think perhaps I'd like to be known.

We women. as glue for the family. lead lives that are important and conflicted. What we women choose to give up for our families is important and valid.

I can be a little OCD when it comes to my writing.

What good did it do to light the world on fire if she had to watch the glow alone?

A romance novel focuses exclusively on two people falling in love. It can't be about a woman caring for her aging mother or something like that. It can have that element, but it has to be primarily about the male-female relationship.

He was afraid that the secrets she'd kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would--for one heartbeat--flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red.

but sometimes one person can hold you up in life, keep you standing, and without that hand to hold, you can find yourself free-falling no matter how strong you used to be, no matter how hard you try to remain steady.