I usually start with something that has some energy, like a compressed character or a situation that's wound up like a spring. Then all I have to do is let it go, let its energy carry the story. And that may not turn out to be the beginning of the book.

Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.

I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.

It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.

I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.