c-span: elsa walsh, why did you write "divided lives"? >> guest: i wrote this book because i thought that women weren't telling the truth about their lives, that they were presenting -- particularly prominent women were presenting a very idealized version of what it was like to be a woman in the '80s and the '90s, and that was a picture that didn't at all reflect what i heard other women talking about ... my friends talking about, women i had interviewed as a journalist. i knew it was a lot tougher out there than the little blips in the road that you saw that women talked about in public sort of presentations. c-span: is this your first book? >> guest: it's my very first book. we also call it my first baby. c-span: was it hard? >> guest: it was hard. writing a book is much harder than i anticipated. it's something that you really have to be committed to doing. but it was also fun, gave me a good life during the period i took off. i was a reporter at the washington post. i'm still there and i'm on leave. and it gave me an opportunity to re