In the Cut' was not what readers expected of me. Before it was published, I was seen as a women's writer, which meant that I wrote movingly about flowers and children.

It is possible to say that all of my books concern themselves with the notion of what it means to be female - whether it is in New York City in 2000 or Calcutta in 1836. In that way, my books really are the same.

Transgressive to me means breaking the rules and sinning. I don't see myself as breaking the rules and sinning. I'm really interested in what it means to be female.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

I feel even old people can do a nice love story, but here we don't make that kind of films. In the West, such films are being made and they make a nice romance, which is more like compassion.

Once you get married, women are still implicitly expected to do the majority of the housework and take care of any future children.

Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

When Katie Met Cassidy' is a romantic comedy about two very different women who find themselves uncontrollably drawn to one another. Issues of gender and sexuality play their part in the novel, but first and foremost, it's a fun, fast-paced love story.