Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.

I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.

I'd read an enormous amount but had spent so much time in my own head that I didn't have extensive social skills. Suddenly I was in this world where I was surrounded by these incredibly polished and wealthy kids who had gone to prep schools, and I felt daunted by them. I don't think people were aware of how full of anxiety I was... For a long time I felt like I was living in a place where I shouldn't have been.

When I was younger I was attracted to people who had that kind of artifice - people who were incredibly polished and had a complex persona that always seemed to be turned on. I was really interested in these kinds of people because I felt so unformed.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

I feel like I go back and forth between being fairly fatalistic and really more hopeful about the possibilities of things changing. And will see how that goes in this election cycle. That will probably strongly affect how fatalistic I am.