Caitlin Flanagan

“At every turn, girls - even the most carefully raised and deeply loved - are surrounded by a popular culture that exhorts them to think of themselves as sexually disposable creatures.”

“My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California.”

“Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.”

“I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.”

“I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.”

“I used to teach at a private school, and the parents thought I loved their children. I did not love their children! I liked them well enough, but I was always delighted to see them go off for summer vacation.”

“Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.”

“I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.”

“Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.”

“Pubescent girls, it seems, are manifestly more likely to exhibit extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms than are teenage boys.”

“My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.”

“Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls.”

“If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.”

“In many respects a teenage girl's home is more important to her than at any time since she was a small child. She also needs emotional support and protection from the most corrosive cultural forces that seek to exploit her when she is least able to resist.”

“Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.”