I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.

Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.

Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.

I think there's a lot to be learned from pop culture. But at the same time I see the dangers of using it in an exclusive way to construct meaning in your life.

Yes, I did try acting when I was in high school and I was terrible at it. So I definitely have had the experience of being bad at artistic endeavor.