Amity Gaige has written a flawless book. It does not contain a single false note. Playful and inventive, SCHRODER movingly depicts the ways we confound our own hearts--how even with the best intentions, we fail to love those closest to us as well as we wish we could. Eric Schroder should take his place among the most charismatic and memorable characters in contemporary fiction, and Amity Gaige her place among the most talented and impressive writers working today.

When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel. The author is aware that there's a certain amount of information she/he has to provide in order to satisfy the reader, knowing that she/he has set something up that must be paid off, but this payment must be made while maintaining fidelity to the characters.

Incident at Vichy, one of my favorite Arthur Miller plays, is a play in which you look at all of the different perspectives of this moral question. And it isn't so easy to decide which position is correct.

If the fidelity [ in a book] isn't maintained, the reader will think your structure is extraneous, or superficial, or that you're trying to curry favor, or live up to the expectations of some sort of genre or structure.

I spent seven years writing The Free World. There are a lot of things I accomplished there that I'm very proud of, but I didn't want to spend another seven years writing a book like that.

It's not for the writer to say whether the thing is successful or not.

Most people will reach a point where, whatever their ideology, they will relent, or conform, and that keeps them kind of in the general mass of people. And for those who find that they can't, all of sudden they leave the general mass, they find that they become exceptions, and exceptional, and often this makes them public.