…there should be an absolute identification between the individual's experience and the writer's so that [experience] serves as the starting point fo… - Rosario Ferré

(Many of your stories use dolls as symbols of women's restricted lives. Were you sort of a doll in your marriage?) Yes, I was. Definitely. But in Puerto Rico most of the women of my generation were in the same situation. I was no exception. Women who wanted to change that or go against that stereotype would be considered odd or slightly crazy. The only reason they couldn't say the same about me was because I made it in the world of literature.

(Q: In "When Women Love Men" every woman who is sexually repressed would like to break those taboos and simply be sexually free.) If you read Freud or a little psychoanalysis, you know that society has to control that or there would be total anarchy. But everybody has the same desires. The important thing was that when this story came out no Puerto Rican woman had ever written about sex. My story is just a little story, and it's not Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, but I think I was trying to go in that direction.

A story is like building a chapel; a novel is a cathedral: That's the difference.