I'm happy to be a woman but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You learn it. It's a kind of mastery and artistry. The deeper person underneath the scent of Diptyque Philosykos or whatever is much less gendered. Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

I'm releasing myself from the responsibility of claiming to know when something is good and when it isn't.

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.