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

I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

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.

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

I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

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