Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

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

I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

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.

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.

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.