In our public life, California is on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country.

I like narrative, and I ultimately am in love with the men and women I write about, most of them.

I always thought the women of my age group got short shrift because the women's liberation movement came slightly after. You look at the yearbooks and you see the future homemakers of America - hurray for that - but you also see them in the engineers club. You see minority kids as student body presidents at a time when everyone was supposed to be terminally racist. Yearbooks are genres; they're also folk art, folk documentation.

The Irish didn't read and write for a couple of thousand years, and I think we developed good memories and recall. We have a sense of the revelatory detail. I look for them.

I believe that's a form of dangerous stereotyping, to ascribe permanent victimhood to any group. Groups have suffered powerful injustice, and yet when you say that, you also have to say that they triumphed, that they prevailed.

It's highly competitive to be here. People don't come to California to drop out anymore. It's a very striving place.

In our public life, California is on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country.