SUSAN STRAIGHT

The American fantasy of love is the 'meet-cute,' 'Love at first sight,' and 'You had me at hello!' The completely spontaneous version of accidental love, which doesn't care about demographics and social compatibility.

All I am is a writer and a mom.

I don't write about myself. I'm never in my books.

I have more than 100 legal pads filled with handwriting. Eight novels, two books for children, countless stories and essays.

I have not ever been able to decide how would my girls have fared if they came up in a different time?

I love election day, and I love to vote.

I love seeing America vote, through the prism of my older working class neighborhood in Riverside, California.

I never saw a gun until I was 24. I didn't grow up in Mayberry; I grew up in Southern California.

I still live in the same place I've lived all my life.

I'm trying to make the readers feel as if he or she is right there in the conversation, and so I don't try to manipulate it too much.

It's always fun to talk about a novel.

My father, born in Colorado, met my mother, born in Switzerland, when he went into the finance company where she worked and asked for a loan.

My mother and father split up when I was three and my brother was still in the womb.

My mother was born in Switzerland, my stepfather in Canada.

All my best memories of my brother are in vehicles, speeding, predatory or celebratory. We were just made to drive. For the last 12 years of his life, he lived as caretaker of an orange grove. There, on 18 acres, my brother collected cars and trucks and motorcycles.

For someone like me who's lived in the same place her whole life - I mean, I lived three blocks from where I was born, and I met my future husband in the eighth grade - there are always family stories and legends passed down.

I first drew the attention of my future husband when we were fourteen, on the freshman school bus for an epic field trip from Riverside, Calif. to Los Angeles, where we were taken to the L.A. Zoo as well as the Natural History Museum.

I wrote a story about a man who is orphaned during the 1927 Mississippi River flood in Louisiana, and he's on the banks of levee, and he's starving. And there are other people starving, too. And he's so desperate, he's seven years old, that he finds a pig that's been abandoned. He kills it with a hammer, and he drags it back.

I've always told my children that Americans will tell you pretty much anything, but that convention dictates that we don't like to talk money or politics.

In 'Love Story,' Oliver Barrett IV comes from generations of wealth and privilege, but when he meets working-class Jennifer Cavilleri, he can't resist. When they marry, his father disowns him, but they struggle on in love, until she's diagnosed with cancer and they can't afford the costly treatments.

More than half of my former students teach - elementary and high school, community college and university. I taught them to be passionate about literature and writing, and to attempt to translate that passion to their own students. They are rookie teachers, most likely to be laid off and not rehired, even though they are passionate.

My brother acquired his first gun when he was very young, from a recently-fled drug dealer's residence. Now, he lived in a rural orange-grove area, and he shot at coyotes who killed his animals and at drug runners who used the groves for transport. Sometimes he joked that he only shot what moved.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

Teachers spend most of their daytime hours with children. Teachers at every level, coaches, counselors, cafeteria workers and yes, custodians, spend their hours trying to make children's lives different, if not always better.

The best thing I could say is you do have to be a really good listener. If I go to a family reunion, and there's 400 people there, everybody comes up and tells me their stories, right? And I think that when you're a good listener, and you can imagine how someone's talking, dialogue is your key friend, is it not?