Danielle: I'm always so interested in writing about women who wrestle with their creative ambitions. I'm particularly fascinated, obviously, with writers and people who are doing it with writing. Working with art and wanting to express yourself through art is something in all of the characters that I explored. I'm always trying to get inside that kind of thing and maybe understand it for myself, but create characters who are trying to do that.
Lauren: The book is about a woman who lives in New York City who has it all. She has everything she thinks she's ever wanted. She puts a lot of importance on her own social capital. She starts to feel as though her star is fading. She takes on a young spin instructor and in a very mammalian fashion, decides that she's going to make her into a superstar, not necessarily out of the kindness of her own heart but to regain some of the social capital that she thinks she's lost.
Jane: A group of people meet at university in the UK in the 1980s. Half are American. Half are English. They live together at university. They become best friends. They swear that they're going to be friends forever and ever. Of course, life gets in the way. They graduate. One of them is harboring this great secret. She really has to withdraw from the others. We follow them individually throughout their lives. Evvie is a model who then is in an abusive marriage and a single mother. We have Topher who’s a soap actor who is gay but has tremendous issues with intimacy. Then we have Maggie. All Maggie has ever wanted is a big country house filled with animals and children. She doesn't get to have the life that she wants. We follow them throughout the course of their lives. Then at their thirtieth reunion, by which time they’ve all completely lost touch, they all show up at their thirtieth reunion. Within minutes, it’s as if time has stopped. They’ve been swept back to those early days. What starts as a fancy, “Hey, wouldn't it be great if we lived together?” becomes a reality. They all move into together. Of course, there is still this secret from the past that is going to show up and threaten to explode and destroy everything that they’ve created.
Lori: I wasn’t originally supposed to be writing this book. I was supposed to be writing a book about happiness. Ironically, the happiness book was making me miserable and depressed. Eventually, I cancelled that book contract. I didn't think I would write another book. I had no idea what I would write. Then one day I started writing about what was going on in my own therapy and what was going on with me as a clinician. I decided to bring people behind the scenes into the therapy room. That is what became Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. We follow the stories of four very different patients as they're going through various struggles in their lives. Then I'm going through an upheaval in my own life. I become the fifth patient. We see me go through my own therapy.
Christina: If I were to go back and talk to myself in my twenties, I would tell her to just do exactly what she's doing. Use your twenties to learn. Have your eyes and ears open. Absorb as much as you can. Then for me, my thirties were about starting my family. That was a whole journey in and of itself and self-discovery and awareness. Now my forties have become this renaissance in my career.
Laurie: Class Mom is about the mother who volunteers in the classroom to help out everybody. My character, Jen Dixon, was a mom very early in her life. She had a crazy ride through Europe following the band INXS. She had two kids by two different band members. Then she finally came back to the United States. She raised her kids. Then she met the man of her dreams and she had another kid. She has girls in college and one starting kindergarten, which is a unique and interesting place to be. She gets roped into being class mom.
Claire: We’re all constantly fighting the chaos that just comes into life naturally. My house, every day, I clean it. At the end of the day, it is a mess. You can let it be a mess or you just constantly work at keeping the chaos at bay. That's part of our human experience is learning how to make the most of the space that we have, whether that's creatively as a novelist trying to make things work, or in the military, constantly fighting against enemies that would like to make our country less safe, or in the case of that character, shaving every day just to keep your performance and your face looking professional.
Cathy: There's an essay called “My Meaningless Midlife Six-Minute Fling.” I write about the experience I've had, sadly way more than one time, where I'm in the grocery store and realize that the single-serving snack bag that I picked up and ate while I was shopping, intending of course to pay for it but I ate it during the course of the shopping, realizing that it didn't contain one serving. It contained six servings and realizing that in my first few minutes of shopping, I've now eaten more calories than I'm supposed to eat in an entire day just because I didn't squint harder enough at the label.
Sen. Gillibrand: I make it up as I go along. Every year I make different refinements on what is necessary to keep me whole this year. Life changes. Your kids change. They get older. You've got to meet their needs in a different way. Every era of being a parent is different. I now have a teenager. Theo is fourteen in high school. It’s very different. Henry’s ten. He's in fifth grade. He's just entering middle school with all those challenges. My kids need different things from me. I try to really meet them where they are and be the best mom I can be.
Priscilla: What I would say to parents who are concerned that perhaps their child is autistic, I would say there's nothing to fear when someone tells you that they think that your child might be on the spectrum. Any kind of evaluation or diagnosis, what's always helped me is to look at it as a way to understand my child better and get more information about the strategies and the approaches that are going to help my child bloom. It has helped Benjamin too emotionally.
