My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.

Don't count on me to take you in because I'm angry. I'm angry at you for leading us on such a song and dance all these years, not just these few years but all the years, skipping all those holidays and staying away from beach trips and missing Mom and Dad's thirtieth anniversary and their thirty-fifth and Jeannie's baby and not attending my wedding that time or even sending a card or calling to wish me well. But most of all Denny, most of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents' attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.

I've always got on very well with the French, perhaps because I'm very natural.