Susanna Moore

In the Cut' was not what readers expected of me. Before it was published, I was seen as a women's writer, which meant that I wrote movingly about flowers and children.

It is possible to say that all of my books concern themselves with the notion of what it means to be female - whether it is in New York City in 2000 or Calcutta in 1836. In that way, my books really are the same.

Transgressive to me means breaking the rules and sinning. I don't see myself as breaking the rules and sinning. I'm really interested in what it means to be female.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

Calcutta is a pot of honey' means that in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the society became truly Victorian in feeling and tone, Bengal was a place to make money. The governor-generals returned to England rich men. It was a bountiful, lush, prosperous, easy place to make a fortune - in coal, in jute, and particularly cloth.

People will be able to survive, of course, without honeycreepers and monk seals. But if the wolf spider is in trouble, we are in trouble, too.

On its 2015 list, the Fish and Wildlife Service included the 'ea, or hawksbill turtle, as well as the green turtle, Ridley sea turtle, leatherback turtle and loggerhead turtle. Four mammals are considered endangered: the Hawaiian hoary bat; the kohola, or humpback whale; the sperm whale; and the endemic Hawaiian monk seal.

While I was writing 'The Big Girls,' I had to take a big breath each morning and calm myself sufficiently to once again enter that world. But friends tell me that it is the only thing that really interests me. They say that I like to be upset.

When I was nine, I was taught to ride a surfboard in Waikiki by the beach boy Rabbit Kekai.

Women are completely disadvantaged - despite what men will say. It is not a fair fight.

The Big Girls' has always seemed to me to be a story about different kinds of families - a divorced mother with a child; a father with his child and his girlfriend; a mother of three children, suffering from postpartum depression; and the rigid artificial families maintained by women in prison - all potentially perilous.

As a girl, I sat awestruck at the feet of Harriet Ne, author of 'Tales of Molokai'. It was she who used to say, 'I myself have seen it,' after telling a particularly hair-raising ghost story - a phrase that I borrowed for one of my titles.