Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.

Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting.

If I tell you that I have robbed a bank, prepare the correct reaction.

That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.

Heavy booze is a big time vacation, but you come back with a headache.

Even if you're the worst writer in the world, at least you'll have the evidence.

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?