It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.

The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.