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.

The biggest problem in the fictional treatment of sex is that it's not treated as part of the story but as a pause from the story. The best sex scenes in fiction are the ones that advance the story.

Living in the world of the workshop, which I do as a teacher, you have to be articulate about craft. And that often involves imposing analysis on work that's in a pretty raw state.

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.

A knowledge of craft is not the enemy of creativity. You sit down to write and realize, today's going to be a really unconscious day and I'm going to let it all out. Or, today's going to be analytical. And some days all mixed up.

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.

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.