Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live."

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

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 do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.