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

Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.

That was one of the reasons I became a writer - I never really had that many friends. I would read a lot, and listen to music. And that was my life.

The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.

I am one Dana when I am talking to my daughter, another when I am talking to the IRS, and another still when I do an interview. These characters are just extreme versions of ordinary human self-switching.

I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.

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.