A white girl disappears from a white prep school in a white suburb. Nobody knows what happened to her. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened. This must be resolved by whatever means possible.

The belief that one's suffering has a greater cosmic purpose, and is thus more exciting and more noble, well, it made a lot of sense to me.

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. In other words: Home has exceedingly low standards.

As a writer, you want to go somewhere else sometimes. You want to vary the terrain that you're exploring.

I love this idea of the body as a trauma archive!

We're not saints, any of us. Maybe somebody is, but I don't know those people. But we all know people who behave very smugly and are very egotistical and put you down as a manner of improving their own place in the world or improving their own place in the world.

I always think it's useful to get an outside opinion.