Christy has not been given a fair shake. She has not been identified as a competent premier.

Does research get in the way of the story? It certainly can. Anything can, given that as writers we're all geniuses at procrastination. But mostly research teaches me about the world. Which often shows me the way, in terms of the story.

I have written screenplays. Most recently for Errol Morris, who was thinking about doing his first fiction movie, and with a young director who wanted to adopt Project X. Errol was a hoot. I loved talking with him. We were a good match, too, because we both kept joking that we'd found the only other person on earth more ambivalent than we were about the project.

I feel like one of the things I'm trying most to do is stretch my empathetic reach, as far as it will go. I got as far as Gilles de Rais' assistant, for example, and not really as far as de Rais himself.

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

I'm tempted to do everything. And sometimes I think, "Oh, come on. You can stick that detail somewhere."

The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself.