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I like to write about women, not so much about the way they relate to men, but about the way they relate to each other. And I don't think anyone's really doing it.

I write about families. That is who we are.

I am keenly aware that in writing about my mother, I am writing about my aunts' sister, and that in writing about my grandmother, I'm writing about their mother. I know that my honesty about how my view of these people has changed over the years may be painful.

Quite a lot of people wanted me to write about my family, I suppose for fairly obvious reasons, and there was always something that would stop me, I thought they were asking me for the wrong motives.

I'm really connected to people, and my relationships with people are paramount, so I write about relationships, particularly strong female ones. In my family, there were six girls born in five years. We were best friends. And my parents raised all of us as first-class citizens.

I do a lot of writing about my family.

I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me.

I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother.

I never thought about what I would write. I just come from such a big family of storytellers.

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.