My son is actually named after Beck, the musician. We heard Beck on the radio and thought that was a good nickname for a child. We named our son Beckett so we could call him Beck - we reverse engineered. And then after he was born and I saw the name on the birth certificate I realized Beckett was a really pretentious name, way too literary. Luckily he's grown into it. We nearly named my second son Dashiell. Can you imagine? Beckett and Dashiell. It would have been a disaster of pretentiousness.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism, and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms.

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.

I feel like in American fiction we're moving out of a period of intense irony, and I'm very glad about that. I feel like irony is fine for its own sake but shouldn't be the sole reason to write a book. It has been an ironic world view: that's the best way I can describe it. I'm a fan of earnestness. I feel like there's a new wave of earnestness and I'd be happy if I'm some small part of that.

Being a writer means I sit in a dark (and pretty dank) room off my garage for many hours a day, and in my wallowing moments I can feel as if I'm already on the outside of society, peering wistfully in.

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.

Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.