As far as writing, I think there’s a lot more freedom I think today in pushing the envelope and the boundaries. For example, in Strawberry Hill, I used certain swear words and certain situations that I’m not sure how that would have gone over with my first books. But I certainly didn’t put everything in because I have very strong feelings about what’s appropriate for what age group. And this is for 8 to 12 years old; it’s a puzzlement.
I wrote something on the Pen website — our Pen group in New York — about this very subject as to some others because a lot of horrible things happen to children, horrible things. And yet, do you want to include them in books for children of these young ages to whom it’s not that they don’t know about them, but depending on the kind of book you want to write
I know with my book Strawberry Hill, if I had put in certain autobiographical things or certain things that I felt would work out with this story, it would have skewed the book so enormously and made that the center of the book and that was not where I wanted to go. So that’s a puzzle. A lot of us have talked about that as well. And some people go further and some people go less far.