A good home must be made, not bought.
The word NO, carries a lot more meaning when spoken by a parent who also knows how to say yes.
It’s not only children who grow. Parents do too...
I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way, but for me, part of the adventure is not knowing how it’s going to turn out.
Many women my age have known the experience of giving up crucial parts of themselves to please the man they love.
The real drug, I came to believe, was love.
Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother ‘worked’ at anything besides raising her children.
More than any other setting – more than battlefields or boardrooms or a spaceship headed for intergalactic travel – I’ll put my money on the family to provide an endless source of comedy, tragedy and intrigue.
If I told you about all the stories I don’t tell, I would be violating the very boundaries I set for myself.
When people ask what I write about, that’s what I tell them: ‘The drama of human relationships.’ I’m not even close to running out of material.
The painter who feels obligated to depict his subjects as uniformly beautiful or handsome and without flaws will fall short of making art.
At Home in the World is the story of a young woman, raised in some difficult circumstances, and how she survives. It tells a story of redemption, not victimhood.
I continued to protect him with my silence.
For 25 years, I did take my responsibilities as a pleaser of others sufficiently seriously.
I compromised my ability to tell my story, at the most basic level.
Long after Salinger sent me away, I continued to believe his standards and expectations were the best ones.
The big dramas that fascinate me are the quiet ones that happen behind closed doors in so-called ordinary families.
I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.
There is a theme that runs through my work, and that is: the toxic property of keeping secrets.
I had known there had been a serial killer on Mount Tamalpais, and it felt so incongruous in such a beautiful, peaceful spot.