I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.

I grew up in the 70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends. Before the age of technology, it was also easier to just disappear from the face of the earth.

There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.