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

If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

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

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

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.