When I wrote 'Home Safe,' I wanted to look at a number of things: the mystery and joy and pain of creativity. What happens when a vital safety net is suddenly removed. The difficulty some people have in growing up. The way a deep love can be as crippling as it is satisfying. But mostly, I wanted to look at the mother-daughter relationship.
I'm nuts about the South - the people, the language, the food, the land, the stories and writers that come from there - but it's hard to know whether I'll use it as a location again.
Everybody complains about getting older, but I find it such a rich time of life. There are negative things about it, I suppose, but more than that, I'm finding it to be a very positive experience in which growth suggests itself in a much more alluring way than it did when I was young - isn't that funny?
As for my 'real life,' yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them.
Writers have a reputation for being distracted. That's because writers are distracted. They are always tuned into that other voice, the one in their head that rarely turns off.
I never meant to write about the experience of losing a good friend to breast cancer when I was going through it. But after it was over, I realized that although something deeply sad had happened, something truly beautiful also had.
I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing for magazines. I wrote essays and then short stories, then moved into novels.
Writing is, of course, a solitary occupation. But for many writers, myself included, it's through writing that we make certain vital connections.
Sometimes the best reading comes just by accident. Someone talks about a book, or you're just wandering the stacks in the library, and you find a book that you love.
No, I am not my mother. I am deeply, endlessly grateful for what she did and who she was, but I am a different kind of person.