As critical acclaim and response has built up, every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I've created about my work and refine it.

I've created a narrative of the world. I live in the world - tenuously, most times. I've avoided the digital world.

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

I don't have children. I serve the world and I serve God by living as deep within my work as I can, reveling in the language of other times and putting it forth for the world.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

She quoted a dead playwright and called me a bullet with nothing but a future. She understood my lack of self-pity. She knew why I despised everything that might restrict my forward momentum. She knew that bullets have no conscience. They speed past things and miss their marks as often as they hit them.

Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.