No one could suspect the intricate mysteries of her heart.

After Memory Keepers Daughter, it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.

They turned a distracted gaze on the world, wide-eyed, somehow, and questioning.

This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.

...and the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood.

She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.

Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.