Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own.