I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern... Then I had this really extraordinary, different life than my parents.

I like to sleep about four or five really solid hours at night, and then sometimes take a nap in the afternoon or early evening after dinner. I love naps.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call 'contemporary headline horror,' stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news.

The thing that made me turn more towards writing was realizing how hard it was going to be to get a singular vision on film and how much more control I would have if I were writing novels.

The kind of person I find myself interested in is a cross between being very emotionally complex and very immature. That's what I felt I was like when I was younger.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.