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.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

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

As writer pay declined and teacher pay also, we all started hanging out online. You could say online social networks cheapen our friendships or you could say we were cheapened by a plutocratic power grab and this is all we can afford.

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.

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

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.