A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

I find poignancy in the moments when a person realizes that she has made mistakes. I am not as interested in the mistakes themselves as I am with the consequences and how the person responds to her realization.

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

Tell me it's forbidden, unthinkable, and that's where I want to go. Because the chances are it's complicated, and the complications are meaningful.

My husband is a musician. He cooks and he's a chef but he also, he makes basement recordings. So many people in my life make basement recordings, so I feel very lucky, I'm surrounded by very creative people.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.