But the fact is I'm not work-identified. I'm not a lawyer or a writer. I'm a mom and I'm a woman and that's the kind of people I want to see in books in the starring role.

To this day my mom's unsinkable spirit is an inspiration to me. For nearly thirty years she's worked at the Library of Congress. Everyone knows Sameha simply as 'Sami.' Along with 500 miles of shelved books her closest friendships are cataloged in that library. They are as much the value of work to my mom as is the work itself.

My mom used to tell me stories at night read books to me - and I read 'em over and over and over again. And you know what I learned from that? I went back and looked at everything - Why do I like reading the same stories over and over and over again? What was I some kind of nincompoop? No - the narrative gave me connection with my mom.

Many of my books come from what if questions that I can't answer things that I'm worried about as either a woman a wife a mom an American.

If you would ask my mom what books I liked growing up I liked Dr. Seuss.

Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life or at any rate no man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

We cannot learn men from books.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely except in books. White men adored them Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in American medical magazines and textbooks I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor.