We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.

I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she only writes one draft. I've thought about this a lot; I think it's because she writes it 80 times in her head before it comes out.

I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.

I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.

Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890s that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would be an accomplishment. But this is a book that is truly riveting, a narrative that gallops. Lizzy Borden eat your heart out. Here’s a real crime of passion. Or was it? I dare you to pick this one up and try, just try to put it down.

I usually have a location and then I put the character there. I love place names. I think I'm tricking myself by being so specific - it suddenly becomes real to me. Just because I say it's Chicago, Illinois doesn't mean it's true, but place names sort of make me grounded and then I can put some people there.

If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end.