How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself?

Then I turned the page and at the top it said THINGS I MISS ABOUT M and there was a list of 15 things, and the first was THE WAY HE HOLDS THINGS. I did not understand how you can miss the way somebody holds things.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.

My first novel, 'Man Walks Into a Room,' is about a man who's lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it's about how we create a coherent sense of self.