With kids, they force you to get out of bed. They force you to smile. They remind you of spontaneity.

To have a young person speak back, to hand him the microphone for his first-person utterances, you'd have to have an imagined architecture, otherwise people would say you're putting words in their mouths.

With kids, they force you to get out of bed. They force you to smile. They remind you of spontaneity.

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.

Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.