While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.

I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.

But I've married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

If the literary category of 'mordant fable' exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.

We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes.