Comedy is like fictional charm. It's the charm of fiction. Or the charisma of fiction. When you meet somebody who's immediately charismatic, you're attracted to that person. And in fiction it's got to come out in either one of two ways: in the prose itself, and you're hooked immediately because you never want to leave such a colorful and penetrating world. Or, it's simply being a funny writer.

Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.

I can't trace thematic similarities between Then We Came To The End and The Unnamed to a life event; I think it's more just a natural progression as a writer. Everything changes in the second book - tonally, character-wise, situationally - and on top of that, I think I wanted a challenge. I wanted to see if I could do it.

Every time you hear someone read your book and liked your book, you're never sure whether that's going to follow with a similar remark from someone else. Perhaps I have low expectations, but whenever I hear someone say, 'I liked your book,' I don't know if it's going to happen again.

After I left college I thought, very naively, that either you became someone interesting - an artist - or you went into academia. If you ended up in an office you were dull and lacking. And I ended up in an office.

I'm not sure that all books aren't that way. I think that might apply to any book I was writing. The book was kind of the product of this enormous infatuation I had, not only with the office and office politics, but with perspective, and trying to tell a story from as wide a range of perspectives as you possibly can. I tried to capture it all with the first-person plural, but once I settled on that, I used it to tell the story from as many angles as I could. I guess, to put it romantically, it was about a love affair with the craft of perspective.

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.