I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me.

John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.

I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

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.

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

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

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