Poor Harper Seven Beckham, having to live with that name all her life. It's the Boy Named Sue syndrome; at the very least it will toughen her up.
I am careful about fiction. A novel is not a tract or an essay. If I want to write about land reforms, or Hindu-Muslim relations, or position of women, I can do it as it affects my characters as in 'A Suitable Boy.' I could only write about issues specifically through essays. But I'll do that only if I have something worthwhile to say.
I'm a small-town boy who comes from a traditional family on a tiny island called Belitung. I may not know where I'm going, but I'll always know where to come home to.
I had a nervous breakdown at 17 when my first love left me, and he was a typical bad boy, albeit a charismatic one, with a string of broken hearts trailing behind him.
I'm the youngest of four siblings and the baby of the family. My family just treated me like anyone else growing up. They taught me that everyone has a special and unique trait about them, and that mine is that I have a girl brain and a boy body.
I did not want to take a troop. I was the mother of a little boy. I knew nothing about little girls.
I was in the Boy Scouts for about four years until my troop disbanded. It is really one of the best activities youths can get involved in and nearly every scout I have known has been a class act due to the discipline the Scouts have instilled in them.
When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis.
Boy's natural play is rough and tumble play, it's the universal play of little boys. And it's very different from aggression. And we are a society that's failing to understand the distinction.
In the middle of a play, I go crazy and don't realize what I'm doing. I'll snap back to reality and I realize, 'Hey, I just ripped that boy's helmet off,' or, 'I'm over here twisting this guy's knee.
Going from a two-year-old Polish boy, who practically came to Germany with nothing more than a football under his arm, to a world champion - it's more than I could have ever imagined.
The paranormal bad boy is usually a fiercely loyal partner for the heroine. Once his sights are set on her, he doesn't notice other women, and he's utterly unconcerned with what anyone else thinks of his choice.
I was the little French boy who grew up hearing people talk of De Gaulle and the Resistance. France against the Nazis! Then when that boy grew up, he began to uncover things. We began to legitimately ask the question, 'What exactly did our parents do during the Occupation?' We discovered it was not the story they were telling us.
As a little boy, I apparently had a predilection for undoing latch gates, running up pathways and ringing doorbells - and then running off again and away before the door was opened behind me.
Oh, boy. I'm still in touch with about 90 percent of my exes. They would describe me as being unlucky in love.
As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity.
I wrote my first novel in eighth grade for a boy named Kenny on whom I had an unrequited crush and who sat behind me in social studies.
The most important thing is to find the balance between city and nature. I have that 'hippie quality' - my husband is a super-hippie Los Angeles boy - so we'll have to make time to go to Puerto Rico, and upstate New York, and be sure we get to do outdoorsy stuff like that.
My mother used to tell me about vibrations. I didn't really understand too much of what that meant when I was just a boy. To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed scared me to death.
In America, any boy can grow up to become president. Or, if he never grows up, vice president.