There are so many people who write really interesting work and try super hard and still don't get published.

Nice girls are not supposed to be hungry. They are not supposed to feed themselves or care about their own food. They're definitely not supposed to take food out of a child's mouth.

I think someone who writes a ghost story probably needs to believe it in some way.

Don't you think almost anything can be funny? Almost anything.

My natural tendency is to fall in love with language and character and setting, and kind of forget about pacing. Narrative tension doesn't come naturally to me, and if it does feel fast-paced that makes me incredibly happy.

I love ghost stories, I love to read them, and I love the idea of being haunted.

I'm really interested in the United States, what it means to be American - maybe because my father's an immigrant and my grandparents were immigrants, and also because I grew up so isolated from mainstream life, and it was such a total shock to leave the commune and, in a way, enter America for the first time when I was eleven - so I've always felt a little like an anthropologist - like, what is this strange place I find myself in, what are the rules here?