I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.