I don't want to write the thing that I am a consumer of when I'm unconscious. I want to write the thing that makes me contend with the thing that I've been consuming unconsciously.

When you're spending that much time by yourself in your car looking at landscapes, it's desolate. Most of the other people around you are invisible in their own cars. You're driving past houses where maybe once in a while somebody is out, but that's about it. So I was interested in that aesthetic and I decided I wanted to write an apocalyptic narrative, but the more I thought of it, it seemed bizarre and untenable to me to pick one, so I just didn't.

You're seeing something that you've seen a thousand times and you just like it. There's nothing wrong with that but it's not a revelation. It's not a surprise. It's comfort.

If you think it's worth writing a book about then that means you suspect that you're not the only one. You suspect that it has something to do with the larger patterns of your culture.

I think there is something about being described and having your abilities described as something definable. I was diagnosed at about six, when a teacher couldn't understand how I could be a bright girl and yet couldn't read yet. I did that whole backwards letters thing. I used to sit in the same place when I did homework because I remembered that B's went towards the window and D's went away from it.

I think we are living in an era of being hyper-concerned about, Is it us? Because we have this historical awareness. People really want to know: will it be us or our kids or our grandkids to live through this? We don't want it to happen, we don't want to be the ones with the poisoned water, but at the same time, I think there is this curiosity, like, Am I one of the "lucky" ones who gets to be here at the end? That's the tension I'm interested in.

Follow Through is elegant, sure footed, smart—a nest of sticks that won’t stay sticks—a nest of sticks that snowballs—scary and marvelous.