I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made me see what the stakes were in the civil rights movement. And it made me see what real hatred was like and the forms that it took. But it also made me understand how powerless ordinary people feel in their lives.

Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.

If you're born lucky, you don't have to be good.

I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time

The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.

Capo, my first golden retriever, so loved to swim she once jumped off a cliff to get into Lake Superior.

No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship