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Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.

It's quite difficult to write about female friendship without it seeming to be a very niche subject. It's a difficult balance.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

I think that women definitely have a special bond as friends that is hard to describe to men, and we don't often see that portrayed narratively.

I've seen the people who talk about their love lives in print invariably have doomed relationships with the person they're talking about.

When I was working on my first novel, 'The Quilter's Apprentice,' I knew I wanted to write about friendship, especially women's friendship and how women use friendship to sustain themselves and nurture each other.

I'm interested in female friendships and family relationships. So I don't write the traditional romance, where you just have the hero and the heroine's love story. I like intertwining relationships.

There are comics who treat women fairly appallingly. But I can be great friends with them because I don't tend to do that ticking of boxes: it can make life too simplistic.

Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.

Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power.