A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn. But it was more for me - it was that women of that generation were even less likely to express themselves, more likely to have that active interior life that they didn't dare speak out. So I was interesting in women of that era. I was interested in the language of that era. There's so much. And, certainly, this is cultural, so much there wasn't spoken about.

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.