“I meditate on the experiences of ordinary people.

I hover deep inside their private lives, lives that almost always mirror larger issues in the world. My characters – like those in my story collection, and the female protagonists of my novels - are multi-layered and contradictory; an amalgam of good and evil.  They are often confused about their place in the world and they struggle to find a stable sense of self. They obsess over fraught relationships, moral yearnings, crazy loves and flimsy hatreds. No matter how difficult their situations are, they confront experience with sharp eyes, ironic wit, and a potent sense - sometimes furious, other times befuddled - of their own historical matrix.”

— Julia MacDonnell