I don't make fun of my characters. I just like to laugh and I think people are funny and the world is funny.

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.

When the kids were growing up, I think they thought the worst thing about me being a mom is that I would laugh at them. They would say something that they thought was serious and intense and I would laugh. I thought it was funny, but they don't want to be laughed at.

In general, I think every novel is a political novel, in that every novel is an argument about how the world works, who has power, who has a voice, what we should care about. But political novels can be boringly polemical if they end up being too black and white, too one dimensional, like war is bad, killing people is wrong.

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.