My Father Expected His First Child To

Raising A Child Is A Little Like Picasso's Work; In The Beginning He Did Very Conventional Representational Things. Cubism Came After He Had The Rules Down Pat.

I Think A Lot Of People, But Particularly A Lot Of Women, Get To This Stage When I'd Say They're Over 50. We Face A Lot Of Hard Judgment From The World, We Women. If You're A Full-time Mother, You Should Be Out Working. If You're Out Working, Your Kids Must Be Being Overlooked.

I Think I'm Like Most Novelists In That My Books Have Gotten Farther And Farther Away From Autobiography The Longer I've Been Writing Them.

Having Children Can Smooth The Relationship, Too. Mother And Daughter Are Now Equals. That Is Hard To Imagine, Even Harder To Accept, For Among Other Things, It Means Realizing That Your Own Mother Felt This Way, Too--unsure Of Herself, Weak In The Knees, Terrified About What In The World To Do With You. It Means Accepting That She Was Tired, Inept, Sometimes Stupid; That She, Too, Sat In The Dark At 2:00 A.m. With A Child Shrieking Across The Hall And No Clue To The Child's Trouble.

For Most Of My Life The Only Ceremonies I've Been To At Which Women Were The Stars Were Weddings. So I Like Weddings.