I had absolutely no trauma in my childhood. If anyone ever assumed that my books were autobiographical, they’d be sorely disappointed, because none of these things happened to me.
I think the ‘New York Times’ reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you’re a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink. I think there are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction.
I was one of the first authors to have an active website. I’m totally obsessed with technology. I’m always looking for ways to connect with my readers. I answer all my fan mail.
If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn’t just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.
It’s a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.
If you want to see God laugh, make a plan.
Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed – sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it’s going to be.
There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you.
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it.
And the very act of living is a tide; at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.
Do you know how sometimes – when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs – you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?
Sometimes there aren’t words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him.
What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.
So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.
You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed – the length of a sleeping baby’s eyelash, the span of a child’s hand. Life turns on a dime, and – it turns out – so does one’s conscience.
I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere.
It’s disappointing to know that someone can see right through you.
Things had a way of working out for the best when you let them run their course.
It’s choice that makes us human.
What if love wasn’t the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?