I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.

Sex makes things strained. There are lovely people in Oneida, but everyone was married to everyone else. And you had fathers and mothers watching their twelve-year-old daughters being inducted into the group marriage by sixty-five-year-old men. There are creepy aspects of a lot of intentional communities when it comes to sex.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

I'm ambivalent about the Orange Prize. I was really proud to be shortlisted alongside the other writers, whom I admire. That said, I don't know if it's best way of addressing gender inequality problems.

At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.

As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved.

A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.