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

I laugh when I'm writing. I feel like all my work is funny to me.

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?

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

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.

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

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