I wasn't always a writer. When I went to college and majored in fine arts I was a painter. Then I was a stay-at-home mom.

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.

I've always been a writer because I've always been a student. My mom's a retired professor so I come from a very academic background. I love writing you know?

I don't practice but I am still officially in paediatrics. I keep in touch with journals and I have a very good data bank of medical information and there is a key thing for a writer knowing where to go. I know where to go to get the information that I need.

Even in the beginning when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song as one songwriter to another I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.

You know my first three or four drafts you can see are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at.

The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.

Everything starts and ends with the song and working with writers and really learning their process and craft was an invaluable experience.

Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

I've seen a lot of the United States having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It's such a strange and fascinating country and instead of learning about it through a textbook I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers.