With most of my books, there are some parts that pop up right away, and other parts I have to wait for.

I had read [Charles] Dickens's novels were often published serially. I thought it would be fun to write a book, just sitting down and writing a chapter every day, not knowing what would happen next. So that's how I wrote the first draft. And then of course I had to go back and make sure everything worked and change things.

I'm German, after all.

I don't feel like it's something I invented myself, rather something I absorbed and continue to do.

Often they do go back and forth the whole way, and I don't know until the very end what the last line of the book is going to be. That was true here - the very last line of the book was the last thing that happened.

We had a dog, Lucky, who was fourteen years old. For the last year of his life, I would take him on these walks that were long but didn't cover much distance.

If I could make a career out of drawing little girls hiding in corners, I would do really well.