August 2009. So I’m sitting here crying cause I can’t get anything done because there are so many kids running around…some of them not even mine…and I keep having to feed them… especially the ones on the cusp of adolescence. Madeleine L’Engle had a cook and a housekeeper last time I checked. It’s not like I don’t have anything else to do.

My husband says his old high school friend writes romance novels and is absolutely RAKING in the simoleons so why don’t I do that? And I say, well you’re going back to the East Coast for your reunion next month so why don’t you just marry her? And if you’re not careful I’m going to write you into the sequel and then kill you off. Read my lips: It’s not about the money!

Excuse me for a moment while I answer the door to yet another teenager whose own mother has apparently run out of food. (It’s not that they’re polite, it’s just that the door has been slammed so many times it no longer opens from the outside.) And excuse me for another moment while I pump up a five-year-old’s bicycle tire–I can’t put it off, he’s so excited to be without training wheels–and then, finally, one last moment so I can get the laundry out of the dryer to stop that annoying little tweet, a handy appliance feature clearly designed by a male engineer. (Don’t tell anyone but sometimes I just go down and open and shut the door AND DON’T GET THE LAUNDRY. I know, you didn’t have me pegged. I’m the quietly subversive type–like Gandhi.)

So now I’m hiding in the far corner of the yard, by the chicken coop. Away from the patio table. Even if the children do find me (who embedded that RFID in my neck?) they will not approach here, because they’ll be afraid I’ll ask them to clean out the chicken watering device. Now I can really, and seriously, ponder the question of why women write.

I saw a stranger in a coffee shop a couple weeks ago. I’d given up take-out coffee, as a key building block of my very own Household Economizing Plan, but it was 105 degrees in the shade in Portland and we don’t have air conditioning. So I carved out an exception as I was driving home from somewhere (the a.c. in the car also broken), and I turned in at a Starbucks to get an iced coffee.

I was stirring in the many sweetener packets, which is okay because they don’t have any calories even if my husband tells me aspartame will rot my brain out, stirring them in and snapping down the lid again, all rather swiftly–I didn’t have the kids with me, so I was preoccupied with getting back to them. At the door a twenty-something woman buried in an armchair was looking at me. But when I met her glance, for some reason I didn’t quick-smile hello, and just as quickly she looked away. Outside it registered: she’d had a baby in her lap, perhaps eight months old, that she lifted up to readjust as she averted her eyes, and she didn’t look happy. She had been staring at me. There could’ve been a million reasons for that, like I can’t believe how many sweetener packets that woman is putting in her coffee, or well, just anything, but I thought about her as I pulled the car out,

and I couldn’t stop thinking about her as I drove away. I wanted to turn around and go back and say hi, how you doing? Say, what a cute baby. How old is she? Or, are you living without air conditioning too? But of course I didn’t. And she’s still there, in my mind, looking unhappy.

Why am I thinking about her right now? Children’s voices waft out the windows in search of me but I am now insulated from them, not so much physically because of my absence from the patio, but mentally, because somehow, some way, I am now in a space where I feel it’s okay not to answer for a minute. I guess the grass really is greener by the chicken coop. And I understand why I’m thinking about this person I saw, this particular person, this young mom. Because I realize: the question is not why women write–but who they are writing for. And the answer to why women write, is who they are writing for.

I am writing for that woman in the coffee shop.

I’m writing for Jodi, who knows about “the universe of lost answers.” For Ruth Ann, who gave me a poem she wrote with a magnifying glass in her left hand. For the fifteen-year- old beggar on Pioneer Square who claimed she was twenty-four and when asked what’s your value? What can you do? mumbled I can draw a little with cast-down eyes as she sucked on a butt from the six-dollar pack of smokes she was clutching like a life preserver in her left hand.

I’m writing for Judy, who counsels battered women in Missouri. For Kathleen, who closed her eyes to listen as I read. For Pat who locked herself in the bathroom to finish the last chapter because her husband was calling her to help clean out the garage. For M. who sent me a six-page letter concluding “I couldn’t not write you,” for Vanessa who told me, first laughingly, then serious, how my book prompted her to change jobs, and for Natalia who barreled me over with a hug: I LOVE your book! I’m writing for that woman I see pushing her twins around Raleigh Park in the blue double stroller who wears a tee shirt that says Books—the original laptop.

I’m writing for the little girls who buy all those cute locking diaries at the dollar store, for them in the future, and I’m writing for the women writers I’ve read and loved who are dead, to continue the conversation the only way I can.

It’s not like I’m not writing for men And it’s not just that old “men’s-and-women’s- interests-overlap-but-are-not-identical” thing. But…women have a certain way of conversing with each other. They talk about certain things, in a certain way. I’m writing for all the women I haven’t had a chance to talk to yet. I want to hear their stories…or tell them, if they want to but can’t and they say it’s okay.

Why do you write?