Old-fashioned girl that I am, I still have a landline, though it rarely rings - and when it does, especially without warning, there's rarely anything good on the other end.

Few targets of ridicule are as easy to hit as owners and handlers of competitive show dogs.

Self-righteousness, when you think about it, is a contra-indicator of self-esteem. It's what sets in when genuine righteousness eludes us.

For a kid, self-esteem can be as close at hand as a sports victory or a sense of belonging in a peer group. It's a much more complicated and elusive proposition for adults, subject to the responsibilities and vicissitudes of grown-up life.

I love writing essays and articles, so it's hard for me to resist taking assignments that inevitably pull me away from larger projects.

The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it's been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I'm referred to as a 'confessional' writer.

If anything, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' is a generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy.

It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I'd been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining.

What I want is to have people's notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you're not really a mature person until you become a parent.

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Confessions are not processed or analysed; they're told in a moment of desperation to a priest or to somebody interrogating you about a crime.

I don't confess in my work because to me, that implies that you're dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you.

Non-fiction about personal subjects is going to attract more user comments than a foreign correspondent writing from Syria - unfortunately.

I think whatever generation you're in has a nostalgia for the generations past and the generations you weren't in.

What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way.

I've always been interested in this notion of what is authentic and how we define that and why our culture imposes certain emotions and emotional constraints onto experiences.

There's this tradition of women's magazines - which have been my bread and butter as a freelancer - where the paradigm is that the writing is about relationships, body image, lessons, and it's always redemptive.

I respond to about a quarter of comments. It's a good barometer of my mental health - when I'm healthy and busy, I don't read them.

Our culture is so obsessed with the idea that you're going to go through a crisis or some difficult event and come out the other side a changed or improved person, and I just think that if you're honest, that often does not happen, and in fact, it shouldn't happen.

I don't think anyone's ever accused me of too much self-love.

Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words.

To me, having 'material' for an essay means not only having something to write about but also having something interesting and original to say about whatever that might be.

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal.

As a mentor and an advocate, I've seen no end to the ways that childless people can contribute to the lives and well-being of kids - and adults, for that matter.