I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.

I'm an anxious person in general, but something about being pregnant and awaiting the release of my first book, The Monsters Of Templeton, made me into an insane anxious person. I didn't sleep at night. I ended up sleeping all day. In a strange way I felt like the world was going to end. I found myself so deeply depressed at times that I started to read about happiness, and that took me into books about idealism and utopianism. Reading books about people who tried to build utopian societies of different kinds gave me a kind of lift.

If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.

She would always feel this wild girl was the truest of any of the people she had already been: adored daughter, bourgeois priss, rebel, runaway, dope-fiend San Francisco hippie; or all the people she would later be: mother, nurse, religious fanatic, prematurely old woman. Vivienne was a human onion, and when I came home at twenty eight years old on the day the monster died, I was afraid that the Baptist freak she had peeled down to was her true, acrid, tear-inducing core.

Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.

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 do like Twitter. Writing is a solitary pursuit, and it can get lonely. I like to go into Twitter for a short period of time, communicate with clever friends, and then switch it off. That's perfect for me.