Fertility says, "Can you relax and just let things happen?" I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen? "And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment." She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything." But you can be ready for disaster. A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up. "If you worry about disaster all of the time, that's what you are going to get," Fertility says.

I think we're in an age starved for genuine experiences, instead of cathartic phony experiences through the media, structured, engineered experiences. And those are the fast food, the masturbation of experience. They don't really exhaust any aspect of ourselves; they don't make us any stronger.

With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can't resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I'll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page.

I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything... I wish, just once, I could say, 'This. This is good enough. Just because I choose it.

How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

As a culture, we believe that if we kill something, we've killed the issue. That's why so many books end with death, why so many plays end with death, because it's full resolution. I'm always curious to know what happens after Romeo and Juliet die. In a way, that's the beginning of the story. Maybe beyond the story is even better.