As a child, growing up in Hampstead, North London, I was shockingly fair-skinned. Holidays involved me spending the second and third day face-down on a bed, shrieking should anyone touch my blistered skin.

Just as there are moments when the words flow and it feels like the easiest job in the world, there are many more when I think I have nothing to say, and my journalism training taught me that writing is a job, that you write whether you are inspired or not, and that the only way to unlock creativity is to write through it.

I had just got married when I started writing my fourth novel. I'd come back from honeymoon, moved into our first house - a gorgeous little carriage house in London - and made my office on the third floor, overlooking the treetops in North West London.

I believe it is the flaws that make us interesting, our backgrounds, the hardships.

There couldn't have been a better Hollywood ending for us. It's beyond baseball. It's rooting for your family.

You forge different bonds with friends than with family, tell different secrets.

I don't know what it's like to be Cuban-American, but I know what it's like to have family under Communism and to get up early in the morning and send medical supplies and try to send food and try to send money and have it intervened, and them calling and crying on the phone.

My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. Now I despise all my seven children equally.