Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.

Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.

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

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

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.

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.