Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.
In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
Usually my ideas are small.
You don't understand me. I'm a teenager. I've got problems!
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.