With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.

I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.

The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.

With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.

Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt.

The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses...It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.