A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.

[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon.

I do think that the idea of writer's block can be very self-defeating for most writers because it's taking a lot of things that are not only real problems, but that are manageable, solvable problems if you look at them in an individual fashion, and lumping them under the umbrella of something mysterious and vague, which makes it very, very difficult to address what's going on.

There are as many different ways to write a novel as there are varieties of human consciousness, so I am totally delighted if people want to use words that come from genres to describe how this book functions because those words are accurate.

Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

Tom, my husband, who converted to Judaism when we got married, and as a consequence, we were learning about historical conversions to Judaism. Really, every time it pops up, it's very strange.

Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems.