She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.

But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.

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.

One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.

If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.