My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.

Some of the food in Liquor is food I've really eaten filtered through a veil of fiction.

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.

I certainly wanted to write a book that was honest about New Orleans without explaining it to death, so much so that the first draft contained references absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't lived here for several years.

Ive tried to avoid labels, but they always find you.

Delete nothing. Move nothing. Change nothing. Learn everything.

And I can't think of a reason I'd ever use a pseudonym, as I wouldn't want to publish something that I didn't like enough to put my name on it.