I've always been a late bloomer in some ways, and extremely precocious in other ways. When I was twenty I was living in New York and working a job and could barely bother to be a college student and had my own apartment, but I couldn't possibly get married before I was thirty-nine.

There has to be insight born of hindsight. Otherwise, you're only confessing your sins and asking the reader to forgive you. And that is a complete misuse of the writer's power and unfair to the reader.

The thing about living in a place like Nebraska is there aren't that many people, so your circle of acquaintances is going be much more diverse. Everyone would go to the same bar, like the local politicians and construction workers. The class intersections were fascinating to me. And of course there's a whole other conversation about what a huge source of growth it was for me in terms of understanding people and the world in a way that I hadn't in New York. I used to say that L.A. is essentially New York with yards.

I don't keep a diary or a journal. Sometimes I'll send emails to friends and that's a way of recording what I was thinking at any given time. But I've never been a journal keeper. I feel like part of that is because I'm always on deadline. I've been a freelancer my entire career and, at any given time, I have several deadlines for all sorts of things whether it's some magazine piece or ad copywriting or anything. Obviously, people with deadlines keep journals all the time but, for me, the idea of doing more writing is never appealing. It's why I never blog.

I mean, being provincial is a privilege in a way. Also people in New York think everybody interacts because they all take the subway. "Oh, I see all these different people! All these different walks of life on the subway." Well, they're not coming to your dinner party. Certainly, in small-town Nebraska, everyone indeed did mix together.

People who grew up before the blogosphere, I just think that your brain is wired differently. I feel like in some ways my sensibility is aligned with people twenty years older than me than somebody six years younger. Because there was a sort of cutoff.

We've never been in a time where mothers - parenthood, but particularly motherhood - is so fetishized. There's a whole industry around motherhood and mother-daughter bonds. And certainly when my mother was sick I found there was an incredible expectation for me to tell everybody how we were having this bonding experience and how healing it was.