Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.

While researching 'The Submission,' I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was about 100 degrees. People thought I was very dedicated.

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.