When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

In short, for me - I'm kind of projecting onto you - distraction has become a modus vivendi, a way of life. Rather than complaining, I am recognizing that I couldn't do what I wanted to do because I'm distracted.

The things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me.

For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work costume. For me, it wasn't Western feminism or the Western workspace. It was my growing up in a house with a bunch of boys, so that male costuming just became my mode of appropriation way before, you know, Betty Friedan came along.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.