When I moved to SF in my early 20s, I loved it, but I was absolutely astonished to discover that people there hated L.A. I was just like why? Really? I had no idea.

Even though I think writers can sometimes thrive from being misread. It can give them something to push off of.

Every snotty egotistical teenager thinks they're smarter than the world they crawled out of. It didn't take me so long to grow out of that. I think I was only in my early twenties when I realized I was just relying on received ideas.

The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.

I was so very interested in literature and so relatively uninterested in the movies when I was a teenager.

My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.