I did have imprinted on me the idea of trauma that changes things dramatically and suddenly. As a writer, I return to that again and again because it fascinates me, and it's where I come from, in a sense.

How much do we owe the people we love? Now I would add a follow-up question: How do we cope with the fact that we can't necessarily give the people we love what they need?

I write pretty much when I can. I used to be very particular about needing certain conditions for writing, but when I had children, I discovered that I was a lot more flexible than I thought.

I am an education ambassador, mainly working with schools.

You have a very poor neighborhood. You have students that are required to go to school. They have no money, no habit of work. What if you paid them in the afternoon to work in the clerical office or as the assistant librarian?

Book clubs, both online and in person, have become a large percentage of the reading public, and many of them won't consider reading books in hardcover.

We think about education as a stepping stone into a higher socio-economic class, into a better job. And it does do those things. But I don't think that's what it really is. I experienced it as getting access to different ideas and perspectives and using them to construct my own mind.