I remember being in the same position as Ruby, when I no longer believed in God as I was raised to believe. But I still am a believer - it's a personality trait, to be someone who can believe. But then what do you believe in?

I am always interested in characters who are in these kinds of transitional moments in their lives, when it's not clear where they're going to end up. It's interesting territory for fiction.

I believe in art, and more fundamentally the freedom to express one's self creatively. People don't know yet what they'll ultimately believe in or how they'll organize their lives. They're kind of in limbo.

Not a lot of contemporary fiction is written about brothers and sisters. Salinger's Franny and Zooey was an inspiration for me. In Franny and Zooey, the sister gets in trouble and the brother comes to help her out. But I wanted to make sure that in my novel the sister had more to do than lie around on a sofa muttering, which is what Franny does for two-thirds of Salinger's novel.

Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the best of his writing.

I remember being in the same position as Ruby, when I no longer believed in God as I was raised to believe. But I still am a believer - it's a personality trait, to be someone who can believe. But then what do you believe in?

I have even taught classes on writing about sex, and I've looked closely at different writers' sex scenes. On the level of craft I've given it a lot of thought. The pitfalls are simple: It can sound clinical or medical, which isn't right, or pornographic, because the characters disappear.