I know books that are really good and writers that are really good and they have become oppressed and ground down from the rejection and they stop. Either they stop writing or they have these books in their drawers. I know that for a fact.

The "we" voice is rare, and the communal impulse of the "we" is interesting to me.

I know books that are really good and writers that are really good and they have become oppressed and ground down from the rejection and they stop. Either they stop writing or they have these books in their drawers. I know that for a fact.

I've always been a teaser, even as a kid.

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

Writers like Twain, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Carolyn Chute, Alice Walker, so many others that I read coming up as a writer, that helped form my ideas of what it means to be American - and an American writer. I'm always in conversation with them.

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.