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I write in the mornings once the kids have gone to school, taking my laptop and a coffee to a little writer's room in town where I plant noise-cancelling headphones on my head and get to work.
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By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy.
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Chick lit was amazing, and I was thrilled to be part of it.
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I spent the first summer after my diagnosis creeping about in giant sun hats and tents, cursing the sun, staying inside as much as possible. Now I am beginning to think the most important thing is educated sun exposure, because the melanomas of today are not caused by today's sunbathing, but by our childhoods and early adolescence.
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I have spent many a night in an Internet chat room, but not since I've been married. I don't do the chat rooms anymore, but I have become completely addicted to Ebay.
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Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.
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I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn't become a writer. I have long said I would probably be a chef or a garden designer or a decorator, but since recording my own books, there is no doubt in my mind that if the writing doesn't work out, voice work is what I would choose.
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Having struggled with food issues and eating disorders myself, particularly when I was younger, I've long been interested in using it within my books.
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Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!
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As a child, growing up in Hampstead, North London, I was shockingly fair-skinned. Holidays involved me spending the second and third day face-down on a bed, shrieking should anyone touch my blistered skin.
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I now realise how liberating all-inclusive resorts are. No carrying huge handbags anywhere. No having to worry about purses being pinched. No totting up the price in your head and fretting that you've spent too much.
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I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.
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I love getting out the house because writing is such a solitary business that even being at the library makes me feel part of the world.
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I read so much about men who aren't what they seem, and particularly stories written by women who found out their husbands had a slew of secrets they knew nothing about.
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The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.
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When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.
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The bad news is that my thin melanoma has something called mitosis, which means the cancer cells are dividing and multiplying even as I write. My thin melanoma has already spread outside of the tumor and into the deep layers of skin.
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I adore children, but I was never that interested in new born babies. It's a terrible thing to have to admit, and you're not supposed to think that way as a woman, but everyone promises it's different when you have your own. It wasn't for me, though.
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Melanoma is not the most common of skin cancers, but it is the most dangerous if not found in the early stages.
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Writing is a muscle that needs to be exercised every day: The more you write, the easier it becomes.
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My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers.
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When I was a student, I had a part time job as a barmaid at a dodgy pub in Kent.
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I have long been fascinated by our inclination to assume others we meet have the same moral code, similar values, and yet we can never be sure.
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I have only ever been to Antigua to hop over to other Caribbean islands. The airport had always seemed perfectly lovely, but I'm a quiet sort of holiday girl, and Antigua always seemed big.