“I know, I always disapproved of this. Even if the books were for older teen readers, they would say, ‘Your characters can have sex but you can’t spell it out. It can only be alluded to.’ I thought that was completely the wrong message: Everyone was having sex but no one could talk about it. It was so that the older kids reading it would know what’s going on but for younger readers, it would go over their heads.”“That’s why Judy Blume so deserves all the praise! She was one of the first authors to write about sex, birth control, and things surrounding that. I think she might have gone back and updated her books to include things like cell phones and stuff. Adapting those books for a younger generation.”“Well, the publisher assigned me the name Katherine Applegate [sometimes appearing as K. A. Applegate] when I wrote the Making Out series. And, Francine Pascal [of the Sweet Valley High series] was a real person. She must have been the first person to write the series. But, by the time I was writing them, it was like a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off. It was very remote. I never met with the creator of the series. I only worked with an editor.”“It was the business of publishing and writing. It was very much geared toward the finished product as opposed to the process.”“I wrote about 25 books in four years. It was pretty fast because you’re only going to be 12 and 13 for two years. These books were not like Harry Potter where readers are going to come back at 30 to reread them. So, I would guess a new YA book came out every couple of months, but I don’t even know for sure. But, I will say that even though the books were paperbacks [and came out quickly], they looked beautiful. They were high quality. I never saw a typo. “At the height of my ghostwriting career, they even invited me to a photoshoot for the cover of one of the books. They had the two girls who were supposed to be the twins and there was the photographer who was known to always have Bob Dylan playing. It was his trademark. And, the twins were like, ‘What’s with the funeral music?’ He was so offended! But, the whole thing was a wonderful experience. I was in my 20s — which was such a magical time anyways — and I was making a living as a writer. Really, I couldn’t have asked for more. It was so perfect. The only downside was that it didn’t leave me any time or energy to write anything else.”“For a while I was writing one book every two months. I wrote 10 pages a day, seven days a week. If I skipped a day I wrote 15 pages for two days to catch up. It was grueling, but it was also really absorbing. I loved what I did, even though it was hard. I had always wanted to work from home and I got to do that. It was wonderful on a million levels. I started in New York and did that for two years, and then I moved to London for two years to be with my boyfriend, who's my husband now.”“The teenage years still feel very accessible to me. They’re such powerful years. The things that happen to you are so painful or so amazing as a teenager that I think it’s actually easier to write about those times. Even today I still write about teens. I enjoy young-adult literature when it’s done well. I read all genres too, but I especially love YA.”“I eventually had my own series called Reality 101, but I don’t know if those books are still in print. I wrote a couple of books called Bone Chillers which was sort of like Goosebumps, ghost and supernatural stories, which were really fun to write. I also wrote a couple of freestanding young-adult novels where the publisher gave me total freedom and I made up the whole thing. It was the first time I realized what a huge favor they were doing with giving me a five-page outline [back when I first started ghostwriting Sweet Valley High]. It was the first time I ever tried writing anything that long on my own. I look back and think, ‘Oh man, that was a disaster.’”“I was really slow to put Single, Carefree, Mellow together. The oldest story in that collection is something I wrote when I was 22. It's a story called “ How to Give the Wrong Impression ” that was published in The New Yorker when I was 25. Then, I didn’t write [my own stories] for a long time — I was writing YA, I had children. When my youngest started the first grade, I had a real chunk of time every day when I could write. That was six years ago. So, the majority of stories were written in about a five-year span. Each story in the collection has a female narrator that deals with some sort of love and betrayal. And, now I’m writing a novel.”“It’s very different from everything else I’ve written. The protagonist is a man in his 50s who left his first marriage to run off with his girlfriend, this vibrant, extraverted person. Now they’re 15 years into their marriage and he’s sort of wondering if that was the right thing to do. Look out for it — it’ll be coming out from Knopf next year!”