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

Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.

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

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

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.