Emma McLaughlin

Studios will tell you that they can't turn a profit on female-driven entertainment. Which is like the Gap saying no one is buying clothes anymore. No. No one is buying your clothes.

I think just because you're a mom, it doesn't negate - if anything, you're probably more enhanced - that you're a woman trying to find your place in the world.

Before novels written by women were relegated to their own 'genre,' I was introduced to Jane Smiley by a dear professor who raised my awareness of what female authors were bringing to the table of contemporary fiction.

I think something that really shocked me as a nanny were parents who sort of assumed the worst from the get-go. People who didn't accept the benefit of the doubt.

Cameron Crowe can write dialogue and shoot it with warmth and humor like nobody else.

It's funny, we started writing chick-lit when it was just becoming a crowded marketplace, and now the same thing is happening with YA. It really used to just be one shelf at the library - Nancy Drew and Judy Blume.

We 'chicks' have munched our popcorn while romantic comedies became just comedies, and then each female protagonist got recast for Matthew McConaughey or Seth Rogan.

My writing partner, Nicki, and I became obsessed with a monologist who performs unscripted shows equipped with nothing more than scribbled bullet points and a glass of water. We wrote him a fan letter and found ourselves sharing lunch and eventually a friendship.

As a rule, I try to steer clear of opinions pertaining to your parenting. I assume you're doing the best you can, and God bless.

If I could give a shout-out to anything in the childhood world, I have to say 'Daniel Tiger.' I want to write a love letter to everyone on that staff. It is so perfectly, thoughtfully, lovingly done. And as a parent, it is the one thing out of everything that we dip in to that really helps.

A Hallmark card with paragraphs about my beauty written by a stranger is vaguely depressing.

Valentine's Day: Rubbing singles' noses in their lack of a mate and the noses of couples in their lack of time.