JAMI ATTENBERG

I'm a really selfish person. But I would do anything for my friends.

For years I drove cross-country, back and forth a dozen times, sometimes on book tour, sometimes just to get lost and found.

I did get in a few fights in school. Kids threw around anti-Semitic slurs, not knowing necessarily what they meant. It was probably just something they picked up somewhere, as kids do.

Many online journals get the most hits of the day during the lunch hour.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

There are generations of people who don't know how to eat properly.

My love can be easily bought with a steak from Peter Luger's.

I can act like a boy as much as I want, but when I wake up in the morning, I'm still a woman.

I don't know much about any of the Hasidim because the men won't talk to me because I'm a woman, and the women won't talk to me because, while I am Jewish, I'm not Hasidic.

When I was growing up in Chicago, my family and I used to go to a local chain, Hackney's, for burgers and their French fried onion loaf. I probably haven't been to one in 25 years, and yet, I once saw Donald Trump from behind in an office building and the first thing that flashed in my mind was his hair looked like that onion loaf.

I am not one of those people who string their exes along. Instead, I run and hide: under the covers, behind my computer screen, on opposite coasts of the country.

I was fat because my parents were a little fat themselves at that point in their lives, and I ate what they ate.

You write a book, and after 50 pages you think it's about one thing, and then you write another hundred and you realize it's about something else, and then by the time you're done, you can look back and say, 'Oh, this is what it's about.'

For years I'd thought my color was black: deep, dark, thoughtful, mysterious. Black, you can hide behind. But now I know it is red.

I won't go anywhere near the new Times Square. It's seizure-inducing.

Food and love are all intertwined at our core level. It can be a very nurturing, wonderful, loving thing.

I have very distinct memories about growing up as part of what was then a very small Jewish community in Buffalo Grove, IL.

My Twitter feed is probably my biggest resource of news. Other people scour the web so I do not have to, and I thank them for it.

I'm pretty pro-food.

An ellipsis is a giant ocean of possibilities.

In the past, I was sometimes put in this women's lit category, and I was never really sure that was the appropriate place for me - although I certainly recognize it can be helpful and correct for other people.

No matter how many feminist tracts you read, you never forget what boys like.

I actually didn't grow up in a household that loved Chinese food particularly, and it's not really my go-to food or anything... We were more a pizza family, being from the Chicago area and all.

In 1998, I started a blog, something I could control very easily and update at my own whim.

Maybe just as many women writers as male writers could be billed as the next great American writer by their publisher. Maybe book criticism sections could review an equal amount of female and male writers. Maybe Oprah could start putting some books by women authors in her book club, since most of her audience is women.