I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.

I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult.

I never troll for material. It simply presents itself, and is always unmistakable. This is why I want to roll my eyes when people interrupt themselves in the middle of some story they're telling me to say, "You know you can't write about this."

Strange - I'm not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don't stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!

I needed to slow down and quiet down deeply into a lot of these questions, yet at the same time what I was looking for, and continue to, is a way to have this exist within a regular, normal, modern life.

I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.

Success is so fleeting, even if you get a good book deal or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: What about the next one?