I used to teach at a private school, and the parents thought I loved their children. I did not love their children! I liked them well enough, but I was always delighted to see them go off for summer vacation.
I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.
My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.
I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.
I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.
My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.
If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.
Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.
Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.
Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.
Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.
Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.
Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.
In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist.
