I locate a great deal of the power of Occupy Wall Street in the name itself, 'Occupy Wall Street,' or '#OccupyWallStreet.' It works because the name contains everything you need to know: the tactic and the target. The name is also modular. You can create your own offshoot in your own city.

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.

I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt.

People think it's suspect and self-indulgent to make art, and I don't think that's true. Some people think you should be busy making something that you can sell in the marketplace, and if nobody wants to buy it, it must be crap. And that's not true.

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

I am, it seems, interested in people with multiple identities. I think we all have multiple identities.

For me writing is an organic process that starts with engaging the language and then thinking about the structure of the novel as you move along. Especially in revision you start to notice correlations. Things come up, not self-consciously, because you're busy feeling your way through sentences and trying to push the language into new places.