Thomas Jefferson once said, "Women shouldn't wrinkle their pretty little foreheads with politics." Now does that mean he was a sexist, or was he just expressing what most males, and maybe most females, felt at that time? Or are both true?

Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or from a Lincoln scholar writing an academic book on Lincoln. Each of these writers has a different audience and different goals. That's obvious.

I'd like to ask Eleanor Roosevelt what she regrets most, because I think that might reveal something that I didn't catch on to while I was writing my book and, hopefully, that would start a conversation.

Thomas Jefferson once said, "Women shouldn't wrinkle their pretty little foreheads with politics." Now does that mean he was a sexist, or was he just expressing what most males, and maybe most females, felt at that time? Or are both true?

If you're doing a good job as author, then you get the reader to engage in whatever speculation might be called for. And it's much more meaningful for the reader, if he or she comes up with the questions.

With the audience I write for, I want to make sure that the reader is eagerly turning every page. I want each of my books to be an absorbing reading experience, an authentic piece of literature. The worst thing that can happen is for a book to have a chilling effect on the reader, to have a kid pick it up and look at a bunch of footnotes and think, No, I'm not going to read this, it's too intimidating.

I think that today's books, in which every quote, every conversation, is taken from a memoir, an autobiography, an interview, or what-have-you, are much more convincing.