I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.

When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes "good" from "bad" luck.