If they want to be someone who is not loathsome, they'll have to wait till the next book.

They can be either a freshman at UC San Diego with one too many piercings or a far-too-perfect Southern California mother.

It's a good life in this sort of Madame Bovary way. It's beautiful and perfect and seems to be just what you want but ends up becoming a gilded cage.

I've always written about maternal ambivalence. It's the subject that consumes me.

It was a group of two dozen women arrayed around this living room. Four were on my side, and the rest were trying to figure out how to hang me.

Usually I try not to read that stuff. For someone who writes openly about her life, I have the thinnest skin. I don't like feeling that people don't like me. It makes me very upset.

Names are important in terms of how you construct your characters' identity, ... But the First Amendment is more important than anything.