When is your next book coming out?
FLY AWAY HOME, my newest novel, is a story that will probably feel familiar to anyone who's been following the news over the last year or two: a powerful politician is caught in an affair, and gives a press conference apologizing for his indiscretions with his long-suffering spouse at this side. The book picks up when the press conference ends — what becomes of the broken-hearted wife of a cheating senator? And how does the scandal affect his adult daughters?

Where do you get your ideas?
Target. They have everything at Target.

Seriously, many of my ideas spring from my day-to-day life, and then get exaggerated, embellished and sharpened.

GOOD IN BED began in the wake of a bad break-up, where I wanted to tell the story of a girl who was a lot like me; a guy who was a lot like Satan, and give the girl a happy ending.

IN HER SHOES came from my lifelong curiosity about the sibling relationship, and how people can come, quite literally, from the exact same place, eat the same things for dinner and go on the same vacations, and wind up very different.

LITTLE EARTHQUAKES was in the aftermath of my first child’s birth because there was so much about new motherhood – the good, the bad, and the ridiculous, the feelings of ineptitude and exhilaration and exhaustion – that I wanted to explore.

With GOODNIGHT NOBODY, the least autobiographical of my books, I wanted to use the framework of a whodunit to talk about the suburbs, the nature of being a mother in America today, and the choices and sacrifices women make.

THE GUY NOT TAKEN encompasses eighteen years’ worth of stories, from pieces I wrote in college (extensively revised, which is good news for all of us) to stories that were published as recently as 2005. Some of them have their roots in real life, and others just answer the “what if?” question.

CERTAIN GIRLS was born out of a desire to pick up Cannie’s story at a different, but equally momentous point in her life, to look at one character I’d created through the eyes of another, and to satirize over-the-top bar and bat mitzvahs. Sadly, that last part didn’t work out so well. In the book, the parents of the bat mitzvah girl have hired people to pretend to be paparazzi and photograph the guests as they enter the bash. I thought that was clearly satiric and utterly ridiculous. The month before the book came out, I got an email from a friend who’s sister is getting her MFA in photography, who’d received an invitation to make some extra money by pretending to be a paparazzo. At a bar mitzvah. Ack.

With BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, I wanted to write about friendship, and the questions of what draws girls together, what tears young women apart, and the price your history exacts. On a less la-di-da note, I also wanted to answer this question: What if Thelma and Louise didn’t have to die?

FLY AWAY HOME was born at a press conference — the press conference where Eliot Spitzer, he of the $5,000-a-visit escort and the Ivy League-educated lawyer wife, resigned his position as governor of New York. I watched that performance and thought, as I imagine many viewers did, why on earth is Silda Spitzer, who's done nothing wrong, standing up there with him? The novel began as my attempt to answer that question: what kind of woman would marry a politician? What would her life be like, and what kinds of choices would she make? And, finally, how does an infamous cheating father's actions affect his adult daughters as they try to navigate their own lives and relationships?

Where do you get your titles?
For my first three books, the titles just came. They were gifts from God, or my subconscious, or the Title Fairy, and they always came very early on in the process. But the first three were my ideas – I get asked a lot whether it was my publisher’s idea to call my first book GOOD IN BED and I can tell you, very proudly, that I thought that up all by myself.

GOODNIGHT NOBODY was originally going to be called – wait for it – MOMICIDE. I loved the title. My agent and editor, not so much (every time I said “Momicide” to my agent, she’d say, “I have another call.”) So GOODNIGHT NOBODY was named after a line from GOODNIGHT MOON that most parents can quote by heart (“Goodnight comb and goodnight brush/Goodnight nobody, goodnight, mush.”) It’s also a fitting description of Kate’s persistent feelings of invisibility.

THE GUY NOT TAKEN was the title that Glamour gave to a short story they published about a young mother who becomes unhealthily obsessed with her ex-boyfriend’s online wedding registry and can’t stop thinking about what her life might have been like with him. I originally called the piece “Door Number Two,” as in, if you pick what’s behind Door Number One you can’t peek at what’s behind Door Number Two, but the editors thought that was confusing (can’t imagine why). They renamed the story, and, unwittingly, the book.

CERTAIN GIRLS was originally called HESITATION WALTZ, which is an actual dance, and which described, to me, the way various characters in the story hovered on the brink of big changes. I can’t remember exactly when I changed it, but “certain girls” is from a Dan Bern song called “Tiger Woods,” in which he writes “If certain girls don’t look at you/it means that they like you a lot/if other girls don’t look at you/it just means they’re ignoring you/how can you know, how can you know?/which is which, who’s doing what/I guess that you can ask them/which one are you, baby/do you like me or are you ignoring me?/Do you like me or are you ignoring me?”

BEST FRIENDS FOREVER was...well, kind of obvious. It's how girls sign their yearbooks, it's popular shorthand these days, and I was honestly very surprised when I learned that nobody had used it already.

FLY AWAY HOME was another tricky title. At one point, the book was called A GOOD WOMAN (as in, a good woman is worth a price above rubies), but my editor thought, correctly, that it sounded a lot like the CBS show "The Good Wife," which also began with a cheating politician's press conference (but then moved in very different directions than FLY AWAY HOME). I wanted a title that suggested choices, transitions, and the allure of home, the place where they have to take you in. And yes, I know it's the title of a movie. I like it anyhow!

Did you always want to be a writer?
After I got over my dream of being a ballerina, yes. Reading and writing were always the things that gave me the most pleasure. I grew up in a house full of books with parents who read me and my sister and my brothers, and permitted us to read any book in the house he wanted, as long as we could give an accurate summary of what we were reading (I remember being eight or so and having my mother take THE BELL JAR away from me after I explained that it was about "a very sad lady named Saliva Plath.") I read constantly as a child, majored in English literature in college, got paid to write every day as a newspaper journalist in the 1990's, and then was lucky enough to be able to devote myself to fiction full-time after GOOD IN BED was published, and IN HER SHOES was written, in 2001. (I think it's important to point out that I sold GOOD IN BED in 2000, and did not quit my day job until Book One was published, Book Two was written, and Books Three and Four were under contract).

Did I read that you’ve got a TV development deal?
Cue the world's tiniest violin playing sad music here as I recount my tale of Hollywood heartbreak! I had a two-year development deal with ABC that was inked just prior to the writer's strike, when the studio was run by a lovely man who wanted me to create comedies and dramas with the kind of smart, funny, well-rounded (in every sense) characters who populate my book. Then the writer's strike happened, and the lovely man who ran the studio was replaced by someone who, it turned out, wanted different kinds of shows than the ones I was writing.

During the two years of my deal, I met a lot of fantastic writers and executives, and wrote pilots that I was very proud of. It breaks my heart that I'll never get to cast them or see them on the screen. But I know that this is typical. Getting a show on TV, when you consider the odds, is a tremendous feat -- the networks commission dozens of pilots, pick up a handful, and actually air a tiny handful of those...and even a show that makes it on the air runs the risk of being canceled after a single outing...and I got paid for the work I did, so I can't really complain too much!

All of that being said, I haven't given up. I loved the writing I did, and the people I met, and I think that it wouldn't hurt if my daughters, and their friends, could turn on the TV and see a smart, funny woman who wasn't endlessly insecure or eternally self-deprecating, who wasn't the girlfriend or the sidekick or the best friend, and who was maybe bigger than the standard-issue Hollywood lady. So I'm still out there, still plugging away.