There is this notion that the lives of the comfortable-off middle class don't merit being treated seriously and with compassion.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form - not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.

There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.