Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would.

War is too strange to be processed alone.

And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good.

Fiction is a place where people can meet, where they take the time to very seriously examine and think about the experiences of other people and about the sorts of moral decisions those characters are making.

The part of the strangeness of coming back from the war is the way we talk about it. We try to have a discussion about the war that doesn't turn into a discussion about one political side or the other. I wanted to reach out and talk to people about it through fiction, the way a narrative can draw someone in and ask them those questions.

Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, “the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.” Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another.

It's not so much the question that offends me; it's that the people asking it don't seem to respect the moral seriousness of the question.