There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all.

There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.