So much of memory comes from the beginning of our lives when we know the world for the first time with a kind of clarity. It is that discovery of the past in the present on which a writer depends again and again as if our lost childhoods, like the surprising cyclamen plant, are forever opening new blossoms.

In the late 1990s, I wrote a book from the point of view of a young black woman who has barricaded herself in her college dorm room, pursued by a man, either real or imagined, who finally materializes as the father she has never known.

As a child, I was an observer, a listener for the stories of grown-ups. I led a quiet, solitary life with my mother, interrupted in the evenings by the arrival of my father who preferred to live in a state of emergency.

Porter is my eldest child, and I tended to be fiercely protective when he was criticized. He actually was not a big complainer about school. Simply selective in what he chose to do and say.

I didn't think marriage worked. I thought everybody who was married was secretly miserable - that it was something they just put up with for their children.

We're not getting married right now. We're very, very focused on our respective careers. Marriage is a long way away. Yes, I'm very close to Vikram Bhatt.

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.

ABC's intelligently hilarious sitcom 'Modern Family' depicts a gay-male marriage in which both partners are refreshingly dimensional, believable human beings. The writers dare to make them flawed and thus fully delineated, but they're not flawed in the silly, stereotypical ways that once dominated such portrayals.