My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.

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

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

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

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

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

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.