Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.

It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.