When I write a new draft, I don't like to feel I'm tied to any previous version. That's why I don't use a computer to write. The text looks, on the screen, too much like a book. It's not a book - it's a bad first draft of something that could one day be a book.

The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.

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.

Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.

The idea of legitimacy is something I suppose I deal with in my fiction, and in part it's probably a response to my upbringing. When I was growing up I was the middle child, pathologically shy, in a family with a very loud and opinionated older brother, and I felt as if I never had the right to speak. As a result, I simply didn't speak very much.

I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.