I did have imprinted on me the idea of trauma that changes things dramatically and suddenly. As a writer, I return to that again and again because it fascinates me, and it's where I come from, in a sense.

How much do we owe the people we love? Now I would add a follow-up question: How do we cope with the fact that we can't necessarily give the people we love what they need?

I write pretty much when I can. I used to be very particular about needing certain conditions for writing, but when I had children, I discovered that I was a lot more flexible than I thought.

Teaching was my transition from student life to working life. In those days, our system of education was a little different. The number of students in each class was huge. I think in political science general, which I taught, it was around 100.

Every single major push in education has made it worse and right now it's really bad because everything we've done is de-humanizing education. It's destroying the possibility of the teacher and the student having a warm, friendly, intellectual relationship.

I think it's fairly unique to define the end goal of K-12 schooling as helping students become better thinkers, more creative thinkers, and to organize the whole school around creative and critical thinking.

There is no doubt that the participation of women in the workforce is a serious productivity boost, but to enable this ambition, there must be investment in care - child care, aged care, disability care, health, and education - which are essential social support structures to enable women to work.