North Carolina was on the vanguard of being for [ trans rights ], and that's why we're seeing this push back. The conservatives noticed that there had been a lot of progress and they tried to tamp it down.

I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.

It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.

There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone's communicating with you. It gives me a charge.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they're on the right side of things.

I usually kind of can't wait until my records leak. Back in the day, you could give people tapes, but you can't do that anymore, because it would be available to everyone on the planet within an hour.