There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?

You know, the biggest indicator of where you live is your income. If you live in this suburb you make this much money, and if you live in that suburb, you make that much money, and if you don't have any money you live where you're allowed to live.

I still think about the writers I loved when I was a kid.

Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.

Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.