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.

We exist because of suburbia. Suburbia is a freak’s dreamworld, a world of extra rooms upstairs and long, lazy afternoons with no interference. A place where you can listen to your LPs for hours on end. You can live in your room, your own rent-free corner of the universe, and create a world of pleasure and interest entirely centered on yourself and your interior aesthetic and logic.

I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

Usually there is a paradox in what a character wants. A conflict is built deeply within them. And then you put them in motion, throw everything at them until they reveal themselves further.

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.

My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.

It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.