I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.

There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty

Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.