In WHO CAN KNOW THE HEART I examine complex mother/daughter relationships, not precisely because I have unresolved issues (though I might have) but because I find the subject one that allows for an interesting exploration of one matrix of the human condition. My oldest sister, twenty years my senior, once told me that by the time she was fifteen she had stopped telling our mother anything. And from friends, relatives, students I’ve heard that story often. Fiction offers a means of seeing how relationships play out differently under different sets of circumstances; it offers an opportunity to question how the world might work differently than we expect. In the end we must all make our own way, in life and in fiction.