SOURCE: Smith, Wendy. “Gish Jen: ‘The Book That Hormones Wrote.’” Publishers Weekly 246, no. 23 (7 June 1999): 59-60.

In the following interview, Jen and Smith discuss Jen's development as a writer, her writing process, and her methods of balancing career with family life.

If your idea of a serious writer is a man sequestered in his study, thinking deep thoughts in seclusion from society's trivial pursuits, then Gish Jen definitely doesn't fill the bill. Like most women with young children (her son, Luke, is seven years old; her daughter, Paloma, seven months), Jen inhabits a world in which the competing demands of work and family are everywhere—literally underfoot, like the baby toys strewn on the floor of the sunny kitchen in her Cambridge, Mass., home. Motherhood has extinguished neither her intelligence nor her artistic ambition, but it's changed both in ways she could not have anticipated. Life is complicated and...