You can't be a free spirit in a place that feels like it was built on lockdown.

You know that's why people don't like unlikeable characters. It's not that they're not interesting. Everybody knows the most interesting character in a book or a movie or whatever narrative is the villain.

Sometimes I think I'm a nihilist because it doesn't matter, none of this matters. We're all following the will of some unknowable higher power, probably the stars manipulating our cellular magnets. We think we have all this agency, but do we? Do we really? Can you choose to be brave when you were born a coward? Can we be deprogrammed from the brainwashing that we grew up in? I think we can, but I think we need a lot of help.

The thing about California is that it's kind of a dream, and I started to feel like I was living in a dream. I still feel like that. Because of that I think I've been able to realize a lot of things that were just ideas. When I was living in New York City, it's such a rat race, it's so competitive and everything is so concrete and in your face all the time. If you're like, "I'm gonna be a writer!" Everybody's like, "Yeah, you and all the other assholes on the subway." There isn't a lot of space for the detached, free-floating movement of the imagination.

I don't think there's anything wrong with pity. Like if you saw a dog having just been hit by a car, you would pity that dog. But then what do you do? Do you leave it there to get run over by more cars, or do you step into traffic and hold up your hand? "Stop! An animal has been hit!" and carry the thing to safety?

I don't remember reading much at all during the writing of Eileen. I go through several years-long dry spells and I don't feel like reading at all. I was working part-time for a guy in Venice, California while I drafted Eileen. He wanted help in writing his memoir. The research had a lot to do with the 60s, so that must have informed my sense of the place and time in my novel, and perhaps even the memoir point-of-view. He was also from New England. It was a fun job. I learned a lot about motorcycle clubs, Charles Manson, hopping freight trains.

For me writing isn't a mental exercise, it's barely even a literary exercise, it feels like a spiritual experience.