I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

None of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.

Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.

I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.