I completely love music. I used to be the music critic at 'The Improper Bostonian.' It's just something I've always loved very deeply.

I wanted to say something to cheer her up. I had a feeling that cheering her up might be a lot of work. I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it’s like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. Except with talking, it’s more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you’re touching around in the brain but the patient, she keeps jumping and saying, “Ow.

I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

I feel like it's important every once in a while to estrange ourselves from the familiar to remind ourselves of the potentialities of people, how many different ways there are of being.

Certain elements of teen life that, 10 years ago, were very important to me still, are becoming less so as I get older. I mean, Ive kinda gotten over, I guess Im saying, the fact that I had trouble getting a date for the prom.

Image of a girl holding a blaster to a twin’s temple. “Remember, bi***. You can’t spell ‘danger’ without DNA.” Blam.