I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

I want to be identified as a writer, not a Southern writer, not a woman writer, not a woman from this or that place, but unfortunately it doesn't always happen.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.

The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.

When I write a new draft, I don't like to feel I'm tied to any previous version. That's why I don't use a computer to write. The text looks, on the screen, too much like a book. It's not a book - it's a bad first draft of something that could one day be a book.

Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.