Pain and suffering are the soil of strength and courage.

Sisters are made by living everyday with each other and wearing each other down until the rough spots are smooth. They're made by sharing secrets you'd never tell mom, and out of doing things for each other just because you feel like it, not because you have to. I guess you could say sisters are 'grown,' not manufactured, in a very special place called a family.

She did know that the journey to happiness was laborious and strewn with seeds of suffering. She guessed that it was probably a place each person had to seek for herself, that each heart had to find on its own.

I wrote the book Don't Die, My Love as I was going through radiation, so it certainly has an air of authenticity about it because I was there. I think all of my books took on kind of a deeper tone when the lady who wrote about cancer all of a sudden had cancer. I'm doing well. I went through it all and they said, 'You're fine."

For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.

I have been through a lot of medical trauma. I was diagnosed with breast cancer .

I wanted to write about the third world and had the opportunity to go live in the trenches, so to speak.