Being in the entertainment industry in L.A. is the equivalent to being in the publishing industry in New York. You don't ever have to hangout with anybody else.

I just am a person who loves houses. In a way, it's dovetailed into one of the themes of The Unspeakable: Why do you have to change? Why don't you just accept that this is how you are? Why do you have to grow from an experience?

What amazes me is when I see people in their twenties who have families or live a life that seems of a much older person. But that's such a demographic, a socio-economic, cultural, class thing.

The thing about living in a place like Nebraska is there aren't that many people, so your circle of acquaintances is going be much more diverse. Everyone would go to the same bar, like the local politicians and construction workers. The class intersections were fascinating to me. And of course there's a whole other conversation about what a huge source of growth it was for me in terms of understanding people and the world in a way that I hadn't in New York. I used to say that L.A. is essentially New York with yards.

And why the hell should you do a really hard, important job that you don't want to do? That has extremely high stakes? That just blows my mind.

I grew up in a town where there were no adults over forty who weren't somebody's parents. It was, unfortunately, the kind of town that's a "great places to raise kids" - that's basically code for "there are no adults here who are not parents." I had a few teachers who were kind of weirdo drama teachers and were hugely influential.

I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.