I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You've got to go your own way, and that's what I did.

That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don't think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.