Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

I was really interested in how marriages work, how you can, you know, be in love with somebody and spend many years with your lives intertwined, but in the end another soul can be fundamentally unknowable. And I think that the stress of war, when one party goes away and the other has to deal at home, is a really testing time in a lot of marriages.

Both my parents loved words. That was the big deal in our house.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.