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.

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.

Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

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.

Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.

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.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

Female adolescence is – universally – an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.

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.

If you’re a writer, you just keep following the path – keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez‘s work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.