How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

Having your second child, in case you were wondering, is a lot harder than having your first, except for those people who find it easier. I'm afraid I don't have the latest figures to confirm this.

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.