I was very, very sick when I was growing up in Russia. The ambulance constantly came to our house. I had horrible asthma that is easily treated in America, but they didn't even have inhalers back in Russia.

My first book really did change my life. It allowed me to fully express myself. There was a sense that I was worth something as an artist.

She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream.

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.

Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.