What I think is important about essayists, about the essay as opposed to a lot of personal writing is that the material has to be presented in a processed way. I'm just not interested in writing, "Hey, this is what happened to me today." You get to a place that has very little to do with your personal experience and talks about some larger idea or something in the culture. I don't think you can get to that unless you have had a lot of time to gestate and maybe if I was taking a lot of notes while stuff was going on, I wouldn't be able to get to that place as easily.

We've never been in a time where mothers - parenthood, but particularly motherhood - is so fetishized.

New York is such a special place. It's really intense for people because they live here when they're young. On top of the energy of the city there's a visceral experience a lot of people have because it's a time in their lives where they're just absorbing a lot. Things take on a significance that they might not otherwise.

What I think is important about essayists, about the essay as opposed to a lot of personal writing is that the material has to be presented in a processed way. I'm just not interested in writing, "Hey, this is what happened to me today." You get to a place that has very little to do with your personal experience and talks about some larger idea or something in the culture. I don't think you can get to that unless you have had a lot of time to gestate and maybe if I was taking a lot of notes while stuff was going on, I wouldn't be able to get to that place as easily.

I mean, being provincial is a privilege in a way. Also people in New York think everybody interacts because they all take the subway. "Oh, I see all these different people! All these different walks of life on the subway." Well, they're not coming to your dinner party. Certainly, in small-town Nebraska, everyone indeed did mix together.

As I've gotten older, I've felt I have more authority on that subject. I think the conversation needs to be reframed. What I hate - a lot of conversations about choosing not to have children tend to be couched in these superficial terms, or kind of glib, "I'd rather have a Porsche" or "I forgot to have kids." No you didn't.

I think it started to feel like home when I stopped maintaining any pretense that I was ever going to be in the movie business. I went there like many writers - I had a screenplay deal and I would go to these meetings and it was the typical thing. And I hated it. I was not interested in writing screenplays, actually. But I kept feeling like that was what I was supposed to do. It was just this horrible cognitive dissonance.