Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

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.

It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.

I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.

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 didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.