Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty.

Where I live you're not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

The great thing about fiction is that I don't have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution. I hope that my stories serve as explorations and help show readers how and why real-life women don't always make the "correct" decisions in the face of economic and sexual troubles. We all screw up, but the women I write about don't have back-up plans or money in the back or resources to fix what they have broken.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it's something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death.