Your heart literally hurts when it's breaking. You can feel it, every beat another ache, and nothing you can do will stop it, either from beating or breaking.

We had so much fun together as friends that I suggested we [with Kate DiCamillo] write a book together.

So we [with Kate DiCamillo] decided to give the friends an object and see what they did with it. The object was a sock and it went from there. Once we got going, once we got on a roll, it became very easy to work together and to figure out how to do it. We would meet for two-hour segments, usually from 10-12, two or three times a week. We met all one summer, and I think into the fall.

We had dinner at Figlio's, which has turned into a restaurant called Il Gato. I'm 99% positive I had Joe's Eggs. I know every time I went there, and I loved it, I ordered Joe's Eggs. Kate [DiCamillo] probably had a pizza, because she loves pizza.

I suppose, the natural outgrowth about writing about two friends, it becomes about their friendship, and the complexities of it, and the way personality plays off each other, and what they each like to do, separately and together.

I'm a big State Fair person, and my main goal is to eat as much food as possible, but I tend not to do the foods on a stick. But I like Big Fat Bacon.

I don't think we [with Kate DiCamillo] intended to write a book about friendship, I think we intended to write a book about two friends.