My story follows a very classic tragic paradigm in which you learn things too late for them to be of any use, and by keeping silent about the thing that you're terrified of, you bring it about - and even worse.

I keep thinking my father gave me Turgenev, and then I realize at some point, Oh, this is a false memory. I mean, that's one of the things that interests me about memoir. It should be as much about how we remember, and that includes false memories, and the realization that one is having a false memory. That's the kind of an interesting way of layering the whole experience of recollection.

I really wanted to get out of that cycle in our family where somebody's taking revenge on somebody for some slight that happened thirty years ago, and the only way to assert one's existence is by climbing over the body of an unfortunate sibling, or with a fellow family member, and you end up even unconsciously rejoicing in the other person's unhappiness and being like, I am happy because I can see how unhappy these other people are.

Writing books is one of the ways that human beings deal with loss, especially when you don't have religious consolation available.

Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.

Comedy has traditionally been about fear of embarrassment.

There are people who are very good at disconnecting themselves and becoming other people, and separating from their family lives and going on. They change their names, they become someone else entirely, maybe out west.