I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.

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

I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.

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

Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.

A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.

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