As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?

I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.

The Internet and all its lures are much, much harder than anything I've ever encountered. If you're writing on a computer, the very instrument you're writing on is already tainted by the world out there in all its permutations.

Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.

I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking "This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi." What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.

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.

Moving to the country has been incredibly good for my work, for my sense of perspective.