Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.

Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.

Usually my ideas are small.

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.