I can say that if you're a writer who happens to be a woman, you'll get a book cover that depicts a woman with no head, or a woman turning away, or a pair of high heels. You have to fight to not get stuck with these covers. In the U.S. women are chick-lit writers unless they prove otherwise, and that's frustrating.

I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax.

It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.

A female writer does definitely get more attention if she writes about male characters. It's true. It's considered somehow more literary, in the same way that it's more literary to write about supposedly male subjects, such as war. You're considered more seriously by the literary establishment.

I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

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.