My first months in Sofia were a time of intense disorientation: I had never been to that part of the world before; I could barely speak the language; everything seemed strange to me.

Whenever I go to New York I try to soak up as much live music as I can, including as many nights at the opera as I can manage.

I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

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.

The academy is an incredibly sheltered world, and I do think it's important for writers to get out from under that shelter, at least for a while, to see what the world looks like from outside it.

Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing.

Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me.