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

I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing. And it was my secret thing and my passion.

I was feeling like I'd been born in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. I don't believe that anymore, not coincidentally two years after writing Eileen. I think that was the driving curiosity for me, thinking about real and fictional characters who could respond to that problem.

I don't really pity any of my characters. I hold my characters under a harsh fluorescent lamp and ask "Who are you?" I'm not doing their makeup or giving them hairdos. They present themselves to me as they are and then I let them say what they want. Usually they're saying something too honest.

I live in East Hollywood which is sort of the end of the grit, butting up against Silverlake and Los Feliz which are the refined gentrified hipster zones, which I tend to appreciate when I need to get coffee, but I like living in the grit. I like feeling separate from that elitist civilization in some way, even though I don't really "belong" in the grit either. But I do spend more than half my time now in the desert which is really nice - to be off the grid, remembering that the world is bigger than the city streets.

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.

I've always really enjoyed sharing my work with others. I find it really hard if I don't think the work will exist outside of my own apartment.