What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that's what we long for as writers.

Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.

For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.

Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.

I try to make a point of being seen. Sometimes when I'm out, I'll buy a juice even when I'm not thirsty. If the store is crowded I'll even go so far as dropping change all over the floor, nickels and dimes skidding in every direction. All I want is not to die on a day I went unseen.

I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.

Then he almost but didn't say the two sentence he'd been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you