I sense people expect something to show for ten years. But I do feel like it is dense. Some of my own favorite books are slim, but there's a lot of weight and power in them.

I can be a fairly hands-on editor, and when I'm editing someone I feel intensely invested in that writer and her work. I love helping to shape a book, and I feel very privileged to get to do that with writers I'm excited about. I think doing that work for the past six years has changed me, and it better prepared me for the questions and suggestions.

It's all just so fraught when you're writing and then going through the editorial process. It feels like this shape-shifting thing. When it's done, and you can't change a single word, it's a totally different thing. I was surprised by what that thing was.

It's interesting, editing can be so immersive for me that I've noticed that the authors I edit have a pretty profound effect on how I hear language for a while.

I would be researching seventeenth-century garden design or I would be doing something with Pepys, but I just kept using all of it to write about Margaret Cavendish. It took me a long time to realize that I just wanted to write a book about her. Years.

I sense people expect something to show for ten years. But I do feel like it is dense. Some of my own favorite books are slim, but there's a lot of weight and power in them.

I had all these sparkles I'd collected and wanted to work in, but when I originally started writing it and it was originally this novel about all these people set in 1666, what I was so interested in was the New Science.