A great interview

with Diana Wynne Jones: "'My books are about people learning to be themselves,' she says. 'I don't have any truck with the notion of growing up, so tiresome, there's no profit in talking about what time and nature will do. But most people do start off with no self-image, and that makes a child terribly vulnerable. They don't know themselves enough to say, 'I'd never do that.' Nobody knows how everyone else seems to be managing -- of course, it's by imitation and invention.'"

The most startling fact is that Diana Wynne Jones's sister is the literary critic Isobel Armstrong! That's excellent; I don't know her at all, but she is idolized by several of my friends. The novel that most closely recounts the sisters' wretched childhood is The Time of the Ghost, a strange and disturbing book.

(Link via Sarah.)