I had to do the academic writing. At a top research university, publishing of a certain kind is very important. So your friend is right. You can't do three things well.

If the act of writing is the act of putting aside the masculine, then you might in that way, it may sound almost crazy to say this, say that the act of writing, for a woman, could be a homosexual act.

In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages.

After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?

When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.

As a first-generation "Asian American woman," for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an "Asian American woman." Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.

I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.