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The only thing that makes a book YA is that it is about teenagers, and it is written in a very conventional, non-artsy, non-pretentious way. YA is not the place for the oblique or the cryptic. If it is in any way experimental in form, it is not YA.

'YHM' has broken many stereotypes on Indian television with its take on remarriage, infertility, and idea of marrying for the love for a child.

As someone who writes and teaches YA fiction, I spend a lot of time trying to define its character and readership, and I don't think I'm alone - genres are all about boundary drawing, and the YA genre is, in a lot of ways, about carving out boundaries around adolescence, a space for teenagers to do teenage things.

When I think about my great conversations with Marlon Brando on the set of 'Morituri,' I think there's a story there, just as I do with my experience working with James Cameron on 'Titanic.' And then there are all my years on 'Y&R' and all that has happened there.

When I was young, there was no such thing as YA. You simply went from reading children's novels to reading adult novels. So one year, I was reading Tove Jansson, and the next year, I was reading Stephen King.

Romance tends to be the whipping boy of genre fiction.

I'm a feminist, but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation. I think what people connect with in novels is this idea of an overpowering, encompassing love - and it being more important and special than anything and everything else.

In a family of all girls, I was always the 'boy' in my mind - the protector, the masculine one. No one would ever have to worry about me.

When I was growing up, there actually wasn't a lot of YA literature as it exists today. Most of the YA that I read was from the '60s and '70s, older than me.

It's nice that there are movies and songs about romance - it's what motivates us as human beings. I'm all for being brainwashed by rom-coms.