The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life; to go places I haven't been; to examine life on earth; to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible; to be surprised.

A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

You refuse to own yourself, you permit others to do it for you

If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.

I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.