I'm still primarily interested in observing as closely as possible the shifting weather between people. I think the master of this sort of thing, and a writer who has meant a great deal to me, is Henry James: there's a magical way that he has of turning the slightest gesture into a whole world of drama and feeling.

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.

I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.

I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life.

I hope that the relationship of the title to the novel [ What Belongs To You] gets more complex with each section of the book: that maybe it begins by resonating with the question of prostitution - to what extent can a body be commodified, what exactly are you renting or purchasing when you pay for sex - and deepens over the course of the book to address larger questions of ownership and belonging.

For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.