It's very difficult, I think for most writers, to carve out the time and the kind of imaginative space to do the writing that you really want to do and also to be an active, engaged, compassionate, giving human being in the world, to the people around you and to your broader community.

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.

A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.

We [me and husband ] had been learning about the Khazars, and I had read Michael Chabon's novel [Gentlemen of the Road] the year before, so all these things are kind of roiling around in my brain, and then I slipped on the ice and I broke my wrist, and it had to be surgically repaired.

I tend to think of writing as a more collaborative project than I think some people do.

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.

Because I think of novels as collaborative enterprises between the writer and the reader, all of my novels so far have ending with endings that maybe point in more than one direction, and that seems important to me because it seems important to me that after you've invested twenty or thirty hours of your imaginative life into this narrative that you have some stake in how it ends.