I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.

It's different to read a book for pleasure than to read it analytically. In the past, I'd read Pride and Prejudice for pleasure. This time, I was really looking at the structure, the order of events, how the characters interact with each other and how the book is paced.

At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion. Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying. You could consider your mistakes, and you might be embarrassed by them, but the box was sealed, the door was shut, you were no longer immersed in the confusing middle.

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?

I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, "I need a little more psychological realism."

I've had people say very dismissive things about my books, but I also feel like I probably have more readers because I'm a woman. I mean, more readers are women and more people who buy books are women, so I don't feel like it's a total disadvantage to be a female writer.