In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.

I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer because I wrote many of the short stories in one sitting or over maybe three days, and they didn't change that much. There weren't many, many drafts. That made me feel semi-brilliant and part of a magical process. Writing the novel wasn't like that. I would come home every day from my office and say, "Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written." At that point, I didn't realize I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part.

This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy for dreaming of something else.

We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.

Most great filmmakers are good at place. Like how people say, like, "The city itself is a character in the movie," you know? I'm so interior. I always forget there's such a thing as an exterior wide shot, where you can see where someone is. As opposed to just: how can we show what this person is thinking, in an abstract way that is felt?

Where do we come from? Do souls really exist? I can't answer these questions, especially not at 6am.

But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us.