Like a tropical storm, I, too, may one day become ‘better organized.

After Birth is a fast-talking, opinionated, moody, funny, and slightly desperate account of the attempt to recover from having a baby. It is a romp through dangerous waters, in which passages of hilarity are shadowed by the dark nights of earliest motherhood, those months so tremulous with both new love and the despairing loss of one's identity-to read it is an absorbing, entertaining, and thought-provoking experience.

I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.

I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, and I don’t like to knock other writers as a matter of principle.

I am basically the sort of person who has stage-fright teaching. I kind of creep into a classroom. I'm not an anecdote-teller, either, although I often wish I were.

I never dream in French, but certain French words seem better or more fun than English words - like 'pois chiches' for chick peas!

I don't believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn't use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer's characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary.