I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.

New York was the Promised Land growing up. Writers were gods! The great gods of American culture... I thought.

The ridiculous way that workplace politics are conducted completely gets in the way of excellence in America.

Sometimes I feel that my job on earth is to put Julie White through horrible things, watch her writhe and then recover.

There's nothing that symbolizes loss or grief more than a mother losing a child.

In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.

What I do know is that with a celebrity's death comes an avalanche of media, and in that media is most often another death - it takes a life that is filled with complicated talent, hope, success and drive and reduces it to the 'story.'

Male privilege and entitlement are dying a very painful death; no one gives up power without a struggle.