Quote

I like stories that affect families.

The thing is that my father's story helps to communicate what was at stake with my mother, and my mother and father had so much a partnership that his story is integral to her story, as her story is to his - really, her story can't be told without his story.

With family dramas, it's hard to keep those stories alive.

My stories are fundamentally about the love of family.

I just want to be part of great stories that are told and for them to be relevant.

I felt like I had never really heard of a story that reflected the stuff I was going through as a mom. I came up with an idea for a story about motherhood that I would want to read.

For many characters, the prospect of having a child in their life brings up a lot of issues about their own parents. And who doesn't love that? Bad mommy or daddy issues are a delicious staple in romance novels.

Stories hold conflict and contrast, highs and lows, life and death, and the human struggle and all kinds of things.

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.

My daughter had carried within her a story that kept hurting her: Her dad abandoned her. She started telling herself a new story. Her dad had done the best he could. He wasn't capable of giving more. It had nothing to do with her. She could no longer take it personally.