There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything.

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

If no one knows you, then you are no one.

I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images.

Julie Orringer is the real thing, a breathtaking chronicler of the secrets and cruelties underneath the surface of middle-class American life. These are terrific stories-wise, compassionate and haunting.

Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.