For the first five years of Luca's life, I desperately wanted to be a good mother and not to pass on this trauma and darkness that his father and I had experienced, but there's a danger of suffocating your kids, too.

It can't be bad having a mother who is fulfilled by her work.

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own mother, a kind of distant dissatisfaction.

I spent a good part of the nineties roaming the Earth writing about conflict. It was very grueling. I was beginning to find this way of life was, wow, addictive and deeply meaningful.

As a child, I first wanted to be a cook because my mother was such a good cook.