I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.

Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.

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

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.