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 felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

Even though I don't sing any more, singing was my first education in the arts, and it's clear to me that my training as a musician also shaped me as a writer.

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'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.